A modified head loss model with a correction factor for the human femoral artery

Understanding the hemodynamics of the human circulatory system is crucial for diagnosing and treating cardiovascular diseases. To this end, one of the critical vascular analyses involves determining head loss, or pressure drop, in arteries, as it provides substantial insight into vascular health and efficiency. Thus, this work presents an assessment of head loss in the human femoral artery, one of the major blood vessels in the lower body, comprising the common femoral artery, the deep femoral artery, and the superficial femoral artery, which extends to the popliteal artery. Our study modeled this arterial system as a network of elastic circular pipes and, using the proposed theories, calculated the pressurized diameters and head loss in each segment, accounting for minor losses arising from vessel curvature and geometric variations within the arterial network. Because the proposed theories rely on certain assumptions, the validity of the theoretical predictions was assessed by simulating a two-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of an idealized human femoral artery using available clinical data for the model parameters. Pressurized diameters were computed using both the CFD model and the theoretical formulation, and the results were statistically compared. The results showed a statistically significant difference between the two, underscoring the importance of accurately capturing the elastic behavior of the arterial wall. Accordingly, a modified pressurized diameter formulation incorporating a segment-specific correction factor was proposed. Findings showed that this correction factor is comparatively high for the deep femoral arterial segment.