Inverse uncertainty quantification of a mechanical model of arterial tissue with surrogate modelling

Disorders of coronary arteries lead to severe health problems such as atherosclerosis, angina, heart attack and even death. Considering the clinical significance of coronary arteries, an efficient computational model is a vital step towards tissue engineering, enhancing the research of coronary diseases and developing medical treatment and interventional tools. In this work, we applied inverse uncertainty quantification to a microscale agent-based arterial tissue model, a component of a three-dimensional multiscale in-stent restenosis model. Inverse uncertainty quantification was performed to calibrate the arterial tissue model to achieve a mechanical response in line with tissue experimental data. Bayesian calibration with a bias term correction was applied to reduce the uncertainty of unknown polynomial coefficients of the attractive force function and achieve agreement with the mechanical behaviour of arterial tissue based on the uniaxial strain tests. Due to the high computational costs of the model, a surrogate model based on the Gaussian process was developed to ensure the feasibility of the computations.