3D CFD in Complex Vascular Systems: A Case Study

Abstract

Abstract. Modeling the flowing blood in vascular structures is crucial to perform in silico simulations in various clinical contexts. This remains however an emerging and challenging research field, that raises several open issues. In particular, a compromise is generally made between the completeness of the simulation and the complicated architecture of the vasculature: reduced order simulations (lumped parameter models) represent vascular networks, whereas detailled models are devoted to small regions of interest. However, technical improvements enable targeting of compartments of the blood circulation rather than focusing on vascular branched segments. This article aims at investigating the cerebral flow in the entire venous drainage that can be reconstructed from medical imaging.

Blood flow in the cerebral venous system: modeling and simulation

“…The realistic three-dimensional description of the geometry of the network was constructed starting from 3D angiographic images obtained by magnetic resonance angiography (MRA). More details on the different steps of the process can be found in Miraucourt et al (2014). The brain venous network is composed by input veins (Fig.…”

PHANTOM project: development and validation of the pipeline from MRA acquisition to MRA simulations

“…In this part, we run a cross-validation between the Feel++ and FreeFem++ results in this realistic geometry. First, we describe briefly an appropriate model for flow in the cerebral venous network (see [12] for more details). At the macroscopic scale, the brain venous network (see Fig.…”

“…We first start from real MRA data from which we extract the vascular volumes. We then generate the 3D vascular mesh (see [12] for more details). We perform 3D+t simulations of blood flow in the complex (arterial and venous) mesh.…”