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BACKGROUND: Sand therapy is a non-pharmacological physiotherapy method that uses the natural environment and resources of Xinjiang to treat through the heat transfer and magnetic effects of sand. OBJECTIVE: Employing the two-phase flow-Casson blood flow model, we investigate the mechanism of atherosclerosis prevention via sand therapy, offering a biomechanical theoretical rationale for the prevention of atherosclerosis through sand therapy via the prism of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). METHODS: Sand therapy experiments were conducted to obtain popliteal artery blood flow velocity, and blood was considered as a two-phase flow composed of plasma and red blood cells, and CFD method was applied to analyze the hemodynamic effects of Casson's blood viscosity model before and after sand therapy. RESULTS: (1) The blood flow velocity increased by 0.24 m/s and 0.04 m/s at peak systolic and diastolic phases, respectively, after sand therapy; the axial velocity of blood vessels increased by 28.56% after sand therapy. (2) The average red blood cell viscosity decreased by 0.00014 Pa ⋅ s after sand therapy. (3) The low wall shear stress increased by 1.09 Pa and the high wall shear stress reached 41.47 Pa after sand therapy. (4) The time-averaged wall shear stress, shear oscillation index and relative retention time were reduced after sand therapy. CONCLUSION: The increase of blood flow velocity after sand therapy can reduce the excessive deposition of cholesterol and other substances, the decrease of erythrocyte viscosity is beneficial to the migration of erythrocytes to the vascular center, the increase of low wall shear stress has a positive effect on the prevention of atherosclerosis, and the decrease of time-averaged wall shear stress, shear oscillation index and relative retention time can reduce the occurrence of thrombosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theory of rheology of non-Newtonian fluids is based on the generalized Newtonian hypothesis of viscosity. The viscometers for non-Newtonian fluids should implement fluid flows with the known stress and strain state parameters distributions. Ideally, the distributions should be homogeneous in the flow domain. The idea of the proposed method is based on a combination of a capillary and a rotational viscometers implemented in the torus-shaped capillary viscometer. Analysis of the mathematical model of the inertial non-Newtonian fluid flow in the torus allowed to determine the conditions of homogeneity of the mechanical and thermal parameters in the flow domain and to develop method of viscosity measurement. The measured values are the shear rate on the inner surface of the capillary and the flow rate. The measurements are implemented with the computer vision system that processes data obtained from the high speed CMOS camera that records inertial flow in the transparent capillary illuminated with laser. The computer vision system is based on the application of deep convolutional neural network for laser speckle contrast imaging processing. During the experiments, the proposed viscometer was compared with the Brookfield rotational viscometer. The relative error of the proposed viscometer and method is less than 2 %. The inertial viscometer is compact, it allows to study the wide range of shear rates per one test in automatic mode, and it has low fluid capacity of approximately 1.87 ml. That makes it possible to use the viscometer as a point on care testing device in medicine to study the rheology of physiological fluids, in particular blood. [Display omitted] • Inertial flow in a torus-shape capillary is perfectly symmetrical and homogeneous. • Laser speckle-contrast imaging allows one to see flow velocity on an image. • Artificial intelligence allows computer vision to see shear rate of the fluid flow. • Inertial viscometer could be a novel point on care testing device in medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]