Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 20, 2025
Combined Near-infrared Fluorescent Imaging and Micro-computed Tomography for Directly Visualizing Cerebral Thromboemboli
Published on: September 25, 2016
A low dimensional surrogate model for a fast estimation of strain in the thrombus during a thrombectomy procedure
Sara Bridio1, Giulia Luraghi1, Francesco Migliavacca1
1Laboratory of Biological Structure Mechanics (LaBS), Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering "Giulio Natta", Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy.
Background:
Intra-arterial thrombectomy is the main treatment for acute ischemic stroke due to large vessel occlusions and can consist in mechanically removing the thrombus with a stent-retriever. A cause of failure of the procedure is the fragmentation of the thrombus and formation of micro-emboli, difficult to remove. This work proposes a methodology for the creation of a low-dimensional surrogate model of the mechanical thrombectomy procedure, trained on realizations from high-fidelity simulations, able to estimate the evolution of the maximum first principal strain in the thrombus.
Method:
A parametric finite-element model was created, composed of a tapered vessel, a thrombus, a stent-retriever and a catheter. A design of experiments was conducted to sample 100 combinations of the model parameters and the corresponding thrombectomy simulations were run and post-processed to extract the maximum first principal strain in the thrombus during the procedure. Then, a surrogate model was built with a combination of principal component analysis and Kriging.
Results:
The surrogate model was chosen after a sensitivity analysis on the number of principal components and was tested with 10 additional cases. The model provided predictions of the strain curves with correlation above 0.9 and a maximum error of 28%, with an error below 20% in 60% of the test cases.
Conclusions:
The surrogate model provides nearly instantaneous estimates and constitutes a valuable tool for evaluating the risk of thrombus rupture during pre-operative planning for the treatment of acute ischemic stroke.
