Parametric analysis of an efficient boundary condition to control outlet flow rates in large arterial networks

Abstract

Substantial effort is being invested in the creation of a virtual human—a model which will improve our understanding of human physiology and diseases and assist clinicians in the design of personalised medical treatments. A central challenge of achieving blood flow simulations at full-human scale is the development of an efficient and accurate approach to imposing boundary conditions on many outlets. A previous study proposed an efficient method for implementing the two-element Windkessel model to control the flow rate ratios at outlets. Here we clarify the general role of the resistance and capacitance in this approach and conduct a parametric sweep to examine how to choose their values for complex geometries. We show that the error of the flow rate ratios decreases exponentially as the resistance increases. The errors fall below 4% in a simple five-outlets model and 7% in a human artery model comprising ten outlets. Moreover, the flow rate ratios converge faster and suffer from weaker fluctuations as the capacitance decreases. Our findings also establish constraints on the parameters controlling the numerical stability of the simulations. The findings from this work are directly applicable to larger and more complex vascular domains encountered at full-human scale.