NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF DRUG RELEASE CORONARY STENTS USING A SEMI DISCRETE SPECTRAL

Cardiovascular diseases which include atherosclerosis, are one of the main cause of death in the industrialized world. The most common treat- ment method for these diseases is a cardiovascular stent. The problem is gov- erned by a set of linear partial differential equations with appropriate bound- ary conditions. A semi-discrete Chebyshev spectral collocation method aims to find numerical solutions for the reduced unsteady 2-dimension problem of drug release from the stent. The scheme uses the Chebyshev spectral colloca- tion method to approximate the space derivatives and an analytical solution for temporal space. Numerical solutions were carried out on the concentration of the drug in the wall of the tissue. The drug release profile provides important information about its effect on the delivery of therapeutic agents to the vessel wall. For simplicity, one shape of stent and their surrounding normal tissues are selected, and Fick law was employed. The results suggest that the profile of the drug release from the stent has a 2 dimensional hyperbolic shape. Nu- merical analysis of the error and the rate of convergence of the scheme are also discussed. The proposed scheme is simple to set up, efficient t o implement and