Numerical study of hemodynamics in brain aneurysms treated with flow diverter stents using porous medium theory

Abstract

Conventional approaches of implementing computational fluid dynamics to study aneurysmal hemodynamics after treatment with a flow diverter stent are computationally expensive. Cumbersome meshing and lengthy simulation runtimes are common. To address these issues, we present a novel volume penalization method that considers flow diverters as heterogeneous porous media. The proposed model requires a considerably smaller number of mesh elements, leading to faster simulation runtimes. Three patient-specific aneurysms were virtually treated with flow diverters and aneurysmal hemodynamics were simulated. The results of the virtual deployments including aneurysmal hemodynamics were compared to corresponding results from conventional approaches. The comparisons showed that the proposed approach led to 9.12 times increase in the speed of simulations on average. Further, aneurysmal kinetic energy and inflow rate metrics for the proposed approach were consistent with those from conventional approaches, differing on average by 3.52% and 3.78%, respectively.