From Medical Images to Numerical Blood Flow Simulations in Human Vessels

I. Mallabiabarrena, C. Prud′homme, A. Radaelli, V. Rigamonti, D. Sage

Proceedings of the 2005 Annual Meeting of the Swiss Society for Biomedical Engineering (SSBE'05), Lausanne VD, Swiss Confederation, September 1-2, 2005, pp. F21.

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Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques are becoming more and more mainstream in the cardiovascular research. It is an important tool to better understand blood flow characteristics, wall shear stresses, and recirculation zones in the arterial wall regions which are usually very difficult information to obtain in vivo. However providing these detailed descriptions on a patient basis is very complex, in particular due to the wide variety of individual vascular morphologies.

The pre-processing of the clinical data to define properly the real patient based geometry model is a crucial step to obtain meaningful results. This step requires the support of modern medical imaging techniques (MRI, CT, Doppler) and 3D geometrical reconstructions algorithms.

In this work, we focus on these algorithms and present a first open-source prototype of the preprocessing steps (see Figure). The numerical simulation is done by the tools developed in the LifeV project.

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