  Perturbations to the homeostatic distribution of mechanical forces exerted by
blood on the endothelial layer have been correlated with vascular pathologies
including intracranial aneurysms and atherosclerosis. Recent computational work
suggests that in order to correctly characterise such forces, the
shear-thinning properties of blood must be taken into account. To the best of
our knowledge, these findings have never been compared against experimentally
observed pathological thresholds. In the current work, we apply the three-band
diagram (TBD) analysis due to Gizzi et al. to assess the impact of the choice
of blood rheology model on a computational model of the right middle cerebral
artery. Our results show that, in the model under study, the differences
between the wall shear stress predicted by a Newtonian model and the well known
Carreau-Yasuda generalized Newtonian model are only significant if the vascular
pathology under study is associated with a pathological threshold in the range
0.94 Pa to 1.56 Pa, where the results of the TBD analysis of the rheology
models considered differs. Otherwise, we observe no significant differences.
