Wall shear stress (WSS), which is the load acting parallel to the blood flow on the vascular endothelial cells, is thought to be involved in the formation of cerebral aneurysms. However, the specifics of which types of WSS are involved remain unclear. Since WSS strongly depends on the patient's vascular morphology, quantifying WSS in the actual vascular morphology of patients is crucial. However, obtaining vascular morphology data from patients prior to aneurysm formation is extremely challenging. In this study, we analyzed vascular shape data from 10 cases of cerebral aneurysms, virtually removing the aneurysms from the data. We then performed numerical simulations of blood flow on the resulting vascular shapes, quantitatively evaluating the magnitude and temporal variations of WSS, to investigate the relationship between these hemodynamic metrics and cerebral aneurysm formation. The results revealed that temporal variations in WSS, quantified using the hemodynamic metric NtransWSS, may be involved in the development of cerebral aneurysms through chronic inflammation of vascular endothelial cells.
KOBARI et al. (Wed,) studied this question.