University of Massachusetts Medical School Faculty Publications

UMMS Affiliation

New England Center for Stroke Research; Department of Radiology

Publication Date

2020-11-30

Document Type

Article Preprint

Disciplines

Cardiovascular Diseases | Computational Neuroscience | Disease Modeling | Nervous System Diseases | Neurology | Radiology

Abstract

Many ischaemic stroke patients who have a mechanical removal of their clot (thrombectomy) do not get reperfusion of tissue despite the thrombus being removed. One hypothesis for this ‘no-reperfusion’ phenomenon is micro-emboli fragmenting off the large clot during thrombectomy and occluding smaller blood vessels downstream of the clot location. This is impossible to observe in-vivo and so we here develop an in-silico model based on in-vitro experiments to model the effect of micro-emboli on brain tissue. Through in-vitro experiments we obtain, under a variety of clot consistencies and thrombectomy techniques, micro-emboli distributions post-thrombectomy. Blood flow through the microcirculation is modelled for statistically accurate voxels of brain microvasculature including penetrating arterioles and capillary beds. A novel micro-emboli algorithm, informed by the experimental data, is used to simulate the impact of micro-emboli successively entering the penetrating arterioles and the capillary bed. Scaled-up blood flow parameters – permeability and coupling coefficients – are calculated under various conditions. We find that capillary beds are more susceptible to occlusions than the penetrating arterioles with a 4x greater drop in permeability per volume of vessel occluded. Individual microvascular geometries determine robustness to micro-emboli. Hard clot fragmentation leads to larger micro-emboli and larger drops in blood flow for a given number of micro-emboli. Thrombectomy technique has a large impact on clot fragmentation and hence occlusions in the microvasculature. As such, in-silico modelling of mechanical thrombectomy predicts that clot specific factors, interventional technique, and microvascular geometry strongly influence reperfusion of the brain. Micro-emboli are likely contributory to the phenomenon of no-reperfusion following successful removal of a major clot.

Keywords

neuroscience, clot fragmentation, thrombectomy, ischaemic stroke

Rights and Permissions

The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.

DOI of Published Version

10.1101/2020.11.30.403808

Source

bioRxiv 2020.11.30.403808; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.11.30.403808. Link to preprint on bioRxiv.

Comments

This article is a preprint. Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been certified by peer review.

Related Resources

Now published in PLOS Computational Biology doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008515

Journal/Book/Conference Title

bioRxiv

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Download

Share

COinS