A bi-fidelity surrogate modeling approach for uncertainty propagation in three-dimensional hemodynamic simulations

Abstract

Image-based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling enables derivation of hemodynamic information (e.g., flow field, wall shear stress, and pressure distribution), which has become a paradigm in cardiovascular research and healthcare. Nonetheless, the predictive accuracy largely depends on precisely specified boundary conditions and model parameters, which, however, are usually uncertain (or unknown) in most patient-specific cases. Quantifying the uncertainties in model predictions due to input randomness can provide predictive confidence and is critical to promote the transition of CFD modeling in clinical applications. In the meantime, forward propagation of input uncertainties often involves numerous expensive CFD simulations, which is computationally prohibitive in most practical scenarios. This paper presents an efficient bi-fidelity surrogate modeling framework for uncertainty quantification (UQ) in cardiovascular simulations, by leveraging the accuracy of high-fidelity models and efficiency of low-fidelity models. Contrary to most data-fit surrogate models with several scalar quantities of interest, this work aims to provide high-resolution, full-field predictions (e.g., velocity and pressure fields). Moreover, a novel empirical error bound estimation approach is introduced to evaluate the performance of the surrogate a priori. The proposed framework is tested on a number of vascular flows with both standardized and patient-specific vessel geometries, and different combinations of high- and low-fidelity models are investigated. The results show that the bi-fidelity approach can achieve high predictive accuracy with a significant reduction of computational cost, exhibiting its merit and effectiveness. Particularly, the uncertainties from a high-dimensional input space can be accurately propagated to clinically relevant quantities of interest (e.g., wall shear stress) in the patient-specific case using only a limited number of high-fidelity simulations, suggesting a good potential in practical clinical applications.