MORPHOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN NORMAL AND DISEASED CORONARY ARTERIES

摘要

Coronary artery disease (CAD) including heart attack has been extensively recognized as a dominant health problem in the developed as well as developing countries. According to statistics from the American Heart Association, the latest year for which data is available, CAD were responsible for more than 40% of all deaths and was the largest single cause of death in the United States. In 2002, the direct costs of this disease were estimated around 200 billion dollars. It is widely accepted that abnormal hemodynamics events based on non-uniform and disturbed blood flows play a major role in a cascade of intricate physico-biological processes, e.g., the onset, development, and complications of arterial diseases such as atherosclerosis, myointimal hyperplasia, thrombosis, and arterial aneurysm [1-3]. Non-uniform hemodynamics parameters which favor the abnormal physico-biological processes are mainly dependent upon (i) arterial morphological characteristics such as curved arteries (e.g., coronary and cerebral arteries), bifurcations (e.g., bifurcations in carotid, cerebral, coronary, and iliac arteries) and branches (e.g., branches in the aorta); (ii) whole blood viscosity; and (iii) blood flow waveforms through the arteries [4-8]. Morphological characteristics of coronary arteries such as diameters, area ratio, and bifurcation angle, which are the most important factors for the abnormal hemodynamics, have been applied to the risk assessment of CAD [9-12].