The Impact of Arterial Plaque Tissue Elasticity on In-Body Molecular Communication Scenarios

Atherosclerosis, the plaque formation in human arteries, has recently been targeted within molecular communication (MC) research by proposing a joint communication and sensing approach to detect the growing plaque as an influence on the in-body MC channel. While previous work was based on many simplifying assumptions, more realistic models are crucial to accurately characterize the potential of this technique. Expanding upon existing work that incorporates the non-Newtonian properties and the time-varying flow speed of blood, we tackle the influence of tissue elasticity on the system in this work. Using an advanced fluid-solid interaction (FSI) solver, we characterize the plaque and examine the displacement for different FSI models and plaque sizes. Our results show differences between experimental elasticity models from literature but only very small changes to the plaque geometry within fractions of a millimeter across all options. This is an important step to legitimize the assumption of rigid tissue geometry in future investigations of this scenario under realistic conditions.     «

Atherosclerosis, the plaque formation in human arteries, has recently been targeted within molecular communication (MC) research by proposing a joint communication and sensing approach to detect the growing plaque as an influence on the in-body MC channel. While previous work was based on many simplifying assumptions, more realistic models are crucial to accurately characterize the potential of this technique. Expanding upon existing work that incorporates the non-Newtonian properties and the ti...     »