Mechanical Study Of Vulnerable Atherosclerotic Early Plaque Rupture Model

In the past few decades, more and more clinic findings have shown that rupture of atherosclerotic plaque is the main trigger of acute cardiovascular events, and the unstable plaque is the key to the mechanism of atherosclerotic plaque rupture. Several mechanical models describing the rupture of unstable plaque had been proposed, but each of them has shortcomings, which is difficult to reveal the nature of the rupture of plaque instability completely.A decade ago, Su et al. established a motion model to describe the fi-brous cap of plaque both in statics and dynamics, which based on the moment theory from the viewpoint of stability in elasticity. The dynamic model result-s indicated that there exists parametric resonance during the motion of the cap. And Su also suggested methods to identify the vulnerable plaques. The results were consistent with the clinical experiment. However, the model only discuss the incompressibility of the fibrous cap, is not comprehensive to de-scribe early plaques. Then in this paper, the model always from the viewpoint of statics stability in elasticity, we established two shapes of the model, a flat arch in2-dimensions and a flat sphere in3-dimensions to simulate long narrow shape and shallow shell type of early plaque, to improve the mechanism of the rupture of early plaque. This article is composed of four chapters.The first chapter is the background, introduced the development of unsta-ble plaque rupture in recent decades and the main research results, including several models of unstable plaque mechanics. Then we described the stability theory of elasticity, and the methods and models results of Su et al. briefly.The second chapter, we constructed a flat arch model of the cap in statics stability, divided into axial incompressible and axial compressible, to describe antisymmetric instability and symmetric instability. And the results were com-pared with the results of general arch model.The third chapter, we constructed a flat sphere model of the cap in3-dimensions in statics stability. After getting the exact solutions of transmural pressure, we analysed the envelope solutions. Compared with the results of the flat arch in2-dimensions, we discussed the differences between them in the solutions of transmural pressure.In the last chapter, combined with the models of Su, et al, we proposed the rationality of the elasticity models describing the mechanism of plaque rupture and pointed out the shortcomings of this article as well as the problems should be solved in the future.