Automated adaptive cardiovascular flow simulations

Abstract

We present an automatic adaptive procedure to perform blood flow simulations in the cardiovascular system. The procedure allows the user to start with subject-specific data collected through clinical measurements, like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data, and evaluate physiological parameters of interest, like flow distribution, pressure variations, wall shear stress, in an automatic and efficient manner. The process involves construction of geometric models of blood vessels, specification of flow conditions and application of an adaptive flow solver. The latter is based on incompressible Navier–Stokes equations using adaptive spatial discretization (meshing) techniques. In this article, we demonstrate the method on a model of a human abdominal aorta of a normal subject with geometry and flow rates assimilated from MRI data. The results obtained show that boundary layer mesh adaptivity offers a better alternative leading to more accurate predictions, especially for key physiological quantities like wall shear stress.