A voxel image‐based pulmonary airflow simulation method with an automatic detection algorithm for airway outlets

Abstract

Investigations of pulmonary airflows in respiratory systems are important for the diagnostics and treatment of pulmonary diseases. For accurate prediction of the flow field in an airway, a numerical simulation must be conducted using the true geometry from computed tomography (CT) data. Flow simulation is still a difficult task because of the mesh generation process and preprocessing setup procedures. In this study, we developed a voxel image‐based simulation method using an automatic detection algorithm for airway outlets to simplify the simulation process and improve its applicability in the medical field. Our approach is based on the lattice Boltzmann method with a topology analysis algorithm, which can preserve all raw information from the original CT images and give an accurate flow field inside the airways. Our method can reproduce the essential flow features inside airways, is highly efficient, and decreases the overall processing time. Thus, it has a great potential for future real‐time airflow analyses to provide airflow information to medical experts. Highlights This paper proposed a voxel image‐based simulation method with a novel automatic outlet‐selecting algorithm to calculate the velocity and pressure of physiological flows in multi‐generation–branched airways. Our approach simplifies the simulation process by automatically applying the boundary conditions to large numbers of outlets and minimizes the time‐consuming mesh generation process. Our proposed method has considerable potential for real‐time simulations improving the applicability to patient‐specific medical diagnostics and treatments.

Convective transport of pulsatile multilayer hybrid nanofluid flow in a composite porous channel

“…In a wide spectrum of engineering and scientific systems, pulsatile flows are ubiquitous. Examples include blood circulation [15] and pulmonary ventilation in biological flows [11,21], as well as sediment transport in coastal flows, reciprocating flow in internal combustion engines [28], and movement of sediment. Although it is crucial for both knowledge expansion and technological progress, pulsatile flow turbulence still poses obstacles because of its complexity.…”

Volumetric lattice Boltzmann method for wall stresses of image-based pulsatile flows

“…Pulsatile flows are omnipresent in a wide range of engineering and scientific systems. Examples include pulmonary ventilating 1 , 2 and blood circulating 3 in biological flows, sediment transport in coastal flows 4 , and reciprocating flow in internal combustion engines 5 . Understanding turbulence in pulsatile flows is critically important to both knowledge advancement and technological innovation but challenges have remained due to the complexities of these flows.…”

A porosity model for medical image segmentation of vessels

“…To the best of our knowledge, a similar concept which leads to consistently accurate segmentations without manual intervention has not been adopted. The closest work is the voxel‐based CFD modelling and Lattice Boltzmann Methods (LBM) performed on upper and lower parts of human airways, 31 , 32 , 33 however the focus was not image segmentation. As our test cases, we will first consider five patient‐specific datasets in which cerebral aneurysms (CA) are the target objects, and show that the developed method provides high precision, while being relatively automatic and robust.…”