A meshless multiscale method for simulating hemodynamics

Abstract

Simulating hemodynamic quantities such as pressure and velocity are of great interest to clinicians to aid in surgical planning. To accurately simulate modifications to a region of vasculature, the entire system must be modeled. To facilitate this, a localized Radial-Basis Function (RBF) collocation Meshless flow solver is developed and tightly coupled to a 0D Lumped-Parameter Model (LPM) for solution of the peripheral circulation. The Meshless solver uses localized RBF collocations at data points that are automatically generated according to the geometry. The incompressible flow equations are updated by an explicit time-marching scheme based on a pressure-velocity correction algorithm. The inlets and outlets of the domain are tightly coupled with the LPM which contains elements that draw from a fluid-electrical analogy such as resistors, capacitors, and inductors that represent the viscous resistance, vessel compliance, and flow inertia, respectively. The localized RBF Meshless approach is well-suited for modeling complicated non-Newtonian hemodynamics due to ease of spatial discretization, ease of addition of multi-physics interactions such as fluid-structure interaction of the vessel wall, and ease of parallelization for fast computations. This work introduces the tight coupling of Meshless methods and LPMs for fast and accurate hemodynamic simulations.