Patient-Specific Bile Flow Simulation to Evaluate Cholecystectomy Outcome

Abstract

Gallbladder disease has one of the leading positions by patients’ number in the World. About 16% of the adult population is suffering now from this disease. Cholecystectomy is believed to be a general surgical method of the gallbladder disease treatment, but the success rate is quite low because the surgeons do not take into account the patient-specific features during the treatment and cannot predict operation results.The main purpose of the paper is to create a computational tool for numerical evaluation of cholecystectomy outcome compared with healthy state and current pathological state based on the patient-specific patients’ data. The patient-specific features of the biliary tree were studied by 1-way FSI bile flow simulation. The extra-hepatic biliary tree geometries were extracted from MRI and after that imported to ANSYS CFX for the subsequent fluid dynamics analysis.It was revealed that in the pathology state, velocities were found to have lower magnitude while the pressures were higher. The patient-specific features have a dramatic influence on the bile flow patterns. Cholecystectomy leads to the decrease of bile flow rate in the extra-hepatic biliary tree. The proposed computational approach can be applied to medical practice to evaluate the circumstances of surgical interventions.