It has long been thought that intracranial saccular aneurysms enlarge and rupture because of material instabilities. Recent nonlinear analyses suggest, however, that at least certain sub-classes of aneurysms do not exhibit quasi-static limit point instabilities or dynamic instabilities in response to periodic loading, and consequently, that the natural history of these lesions is likely governed by growth and remodeling processes. In this paper, we present additional numerical results that further support the finding that one particular sub-class of saccular aneurysms is dynamically stable. Specifically, we extended the recent results of Shah and Humphrey, which are based on the assumption that saccular aneurysms can be modeled as spherical elastic membranes surrounded by a viscous cerebral spinal fluid, to account for a viscohyperelastic response. It is shown that inclusion of this “short term” viscoelastic contribution to the mechanical behavior of the lesion serves to increase further its dynamic stability against various disturbances.
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