Chapter 9 - Vascular Hemodynamics with Computational Modeling and Experimental Studies

Abstract

This chapter discusses coronary artery flow assessment for atherosclerosis investigations. The overall goal is to foster the reader’s understanding of coronary flow assessment with CFD and experimental MRI, including advantages, shortcomings, and potential for clinical applicability. In Section 1, we begin by introducing coronary artery disease and how it links to local blood flow and hemodynamic parameters, before introducing strategies to investigating coronary flow for risk assessment—computational modeling and experimental studies. Both of these need the artery geometry and embedded stents to be retrieved first, as detailed in Section 2. Section 3 details the concepts of computational coronary flow modeling with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) including the governing equations, mesh discretization, and boundary and initial conditions. Section 4 introduces experimental approaches using in vitro flow sensitive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), including dynamic scaling for steady or transient state considerations, creation of phantom, consideration of vessel compliance and motion, non-Newtonian blood properties, and the design of an experimental circuit. Postprocessing, analysis, and comparison of both methods are explained in Section 5, before discussion of the accuracy and reliability of the results in Section 6. Finally, current developments, particularly patient-specific profiling, are discussed in Section 7.