Venous disease and compression therapy

Which settings matter

We varied chamber number, hold time, maximum pressure and tissue stiffness across simplified and subject-specific geometries. Maximum compression pressure and hold duration govern venous flow, pressure and wall shear stress. Chamber count — the parameter most visible in product marketing — barely matters.

Tissue stiffness changes the response substantially: a compliant limb transmits more of the applied pressure to the vein than a stiff one. That argues for setting the device per patient rather than per protocol.

Making the analysis affordable

Answering these questions directly requires fluid–structure interaction between the flow and the deforming tissue, which takes hours per configuration and rules out a parametric study. The multi-fidelity coupling developed for this problem brings a full pulsatile cycle down to minutes while keeping flow-rate error under one percent, which is what made the parameter sweep possible.