Comparison of CFD-Derived Estimates of Endothelial Shear Stress to Invasive Coronary Assessment

Endothelial shear stress (ESS) is a parallel frictional force exerted by blood flow on the coronary luminal surface. Emerging data have shown ESS to be predictive of coronary artery disease (CAD) progression. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is used to study fluid flow in engineering and has been increasingly applied in cardiovascular research to estimate ESS. However, there are still concerns over the validity of CFD-derived coronary ESS estimates with no standardised methodology recognised. This study sought to compare coronary CFD-derived ESS estimates with invasive haemodynamic measurements.