Non-Newtonian Blood Modeling in Intracranial Aneurysm Hemodynamics: Impact on the Wall Shear Stress and Oscillatory Shear Index Metrics for Ruptured and Unruptured Cases.

When simulating blood flow in intracranial aneurysms (IAs), the Newtonian model seems to be ubiquitous. However, analyzing the results from the few studies on this subject, the doubt remains on whether it is necessary to use non-Newtonian models in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of cerebral vascular flows. The objective of this study is to investigate whether different rheology models would influence the hemodynamic parameters related to the wall shear stress (WSS) for ruptured and unruptured IA cases, especially because ruptured aneurysms normally have morphological features, such as lobular regions and blebs, that could trigger non-Newtonian phenomena in the blood flow due to low shear rates.