Perturbations to the homeostatic distribution of mechanical forces exerted byblood on the endothelial layer have been correlated with vascular pathologiesincluding intracranial aneurysms and atherosclerosis. Recent computational worksuggests that in order to correctly characterise such forces, theshear-thinning properties of blood must be taken into account. To the best ofour knowledge, these findings have never been compared against experimentallyobserved pathological thresholds. In the current work, we apply the three-banddiagram (TBD) analysis due to Gizzi et al. to assess the impact of the choiceof blood rheology model on a computational model of the right middle cerebralartery. Our results show that, in the model under study, the differencesbetween the wall shear stress predicted by a Newtonian model and the well knownCarreau-Yasuda generalized Newtonian model are only significant if the vascularpathology under study is associated with a pathological threshold in the range0.94 Pa to 1.56 Pa, where the results of the TBD analysis of the rheologymodels considered differs. Otherwise, we observe no significant differences.
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