title: Proposal for a quantitative description of blood spiral flow in medical devices.
abstract: The association between specific blood flow patterns and blood behaviour through medical devices suggests that a Lagrangian study may be a useful instrument for the evaluation of the thrombogenic and/or hemolytic potential of certain devices' geometries and biomaterials. In this study a description of blood particle trajectories in terms of their spiral contents is proposed; such a mathematical description for blood spiral flow, computed along several pathlines, is tested for a quantitative determination of the spiralled motion of blood flow into two three-dimensional numerical models, having different design characteristics, of venous cannula inserted in a vessel. As the influence of vortical flow conditions have been observed to have both beneficial and detrimental influence on blood behaviour in terms of blood-device interaction, of the degradation of its components, and of the efficiency of mass-exchange (in red cells oxygenation and plasma filtration, for example), the herein proposed method for the description of spiral laminar motion may be a helpful instrument to build up a tool to investigate, for example, the existence of correlations between level of spiral flow and geometry (as in the present investigated test case), rather than the effects of blood-surface contact. The results obtained in this test case investigation, confirm the effectiveness of the proposed function for a quantitative analysis of spiral flow in medical devices.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Biomedical Engineering, Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Rome, Italy. grigioni@iss.it
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Grigioni
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Daniele
authors.forename: U
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Morbiducci
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Del Gaudio
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: D'Avenio
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Balducci
authors.forename: V
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Barbaro
mesh_terms: D001783:Blood Flow Velocity / Q000502:physiology; D001790:Blood Physiological Phenomena; D004867:Equipment Design; D004864:Equipment and Supplies; D006801:Humans; D008955:Models, Cardiovascular