Growth and remodeling of intracranial saccular aneurysms

Abstract: We present a mechanical model— a growing spherical shell—suitable for predict-ing the evolution of a Saccular Cerebral Artery Aneurysms (SCAA). It relies basically on the Kröner-Lee decomposition, used to describe the interplay between the current and the re-laxed configuration of body elements. Rup-ture or stabilization of a SCAA are the end ef-fect of a number of biological mechanisms, still poorly understood. We propose a model based on three competing remodeling mechanisms— one passive and two active. Despite drastic simplifying assumptions, preliminary numeri-cal experiments attest to the potential of our model to account for nontrivial evolutions en-suing from accidental perturbations of a home-ostatic state