Device-related thrombus formation considering the coagulation cascade initiated by the contact activation system
The demand of blood-coated medical devices has been increasing over the last years. Unfortunately, biomaterials that are currently used in the devices promote coagulation and other biological events that form thrombus. In the present work, a first approach to account for the coagulation cascade initiated by the contact activation pathway has been developed in YALES2BIO. This method was applied to the backward facing step configuration studied by Taylor et al., (2014) where a flow separation is present as in many actual medical devices. Our results show that the regions prone to thrombin generation coincide with the experimental zones in which thrombus formation was observed. Furthermore, the modeling strategy for thrombin formation was included in an existing model of thrombus growth considering platelet deposition and activation by different agonists.
The evolution of the thrombus (white contour) is displayed in the movie which also demonstrates that the velocity field is influenced by the growing thrombus. In the upper part of the video, the computational domain is presented along with the thrombin concentration field at the first minutes of the thrombus formation process. More details can be found in Mendez et al., Biomech. Model. Mechanobiol., 2018.