  The properties of intracranial aneurysms (IAs) walls are known to be driven
by the underlying hemodynamics adjacent to the IA sac. Different pathways exist
explaining the connections between hemodynamics and local tissue properties.
The emergence of such theories is essential if one wishes to compute the
mechanical response of a patient-specific IA wall and predict its rupture.
Apart from the hemodynamics and tissue properties, one could assume that the
mechanical response also depends on the local morphology, more specifically,
the wall curvature, with larger values at highly-curved wall portions.
Nonetheless, this contradicts observations of IA rupture sites more often found
at the dome, where the curvature is lower. This seeming contradiction indicates
a complex interaction between local hemodynamics, wall morphology, and
mechanical response, which warrants further investigation. This was the main
goal of this work. We accomplished this by analysing the stress and stretch
fields in different regions of the wall for a sample of IAs, which have been
classified based on particular local hemodynamics and local curvature.
Pulsatile numerical simulations were performed using the one-way fluid-solid
interaction strategy implemented in OpenFOAM (solids4foam toolbox). We found
that the variable best correlated with regions of high stress and stretch was
the wall curvature. Additionally, our data suggest a connection between the
local curvature and local hemodynamics, indicating that the curvature is a
property that could be used to assess both mechanical response and hemodynamic
conditions, and, moreover, to suggest new metrics based on the curvature to
predict the likelihood of rupture.
