Nanoparticle Tomography for Vascular Aneurysm Detection

A vascular aneurysm (VA) is an abnormal bulge or ballooning in the wall of a blood vessel, which results in a great risk of death after rupture. The best way to avoid VA rupture is to detect it at an early stage and take proper measures. However, there is no suitable method for early detection of VA. In this paper, we propose a novel nanoparticles (NPs) based sensing method for VA, namely, NP tomography (NPT). We first construct multiple blood vessel models in the forward problem by varying the location of VA and obtain the time-of-arrival (TOA) of NPs. In the inverse problem, we then infer the actual location of VA based on the recorded TOA of NPs, thereby enabling early VA sensing. The proposed methodology is validated through comprehensive COMSOL simulations. Numerical results demonstrate that the VA detection rate through NPT can be as high as 96 %.