Modeling Air-flow in the Tracheobronchial Tree using Computational Fluid Dynamics

Abstract

In this paper, we present a biomechanical framework to model airflow inside the bronchus and deformations across the tracheobronchial tree, pipeline for the simulator, theory and initial steps to realize this framework on a highly parallel graphical processing unit (GPU). We discuss the main challenges expected and encountered to date. By using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and computational solid dynamics (CSD) principles, we propose a numerical simulation framework that includes a biomechanical model of the tracheobronchial tree to simulate air flow inside the tree, on GPU in real-time. The proposed 3D biomechanical model to simulate the air inside the lungs coupled with a deformation model of the tracheobronchial tree, expressed through fluid-structure interaction, can be used to predict the transformations of the voxels from a 4D computed tomography (4DCT) dataset. Additionally, the proposed multi-functional CFD and CSD based framework is suitable for clinical applications such as adaptive lung radiotherapy, and a regional alveolar ventilation estimation.