Hemodynamic simulations in the cerebral venous network: A study on the influence of different modeling assumptions

Abstract

International audienceBlood flow computations in complex geometries are of major interest in various cardio-vascular applications. However, deriving an appropriate computational model is still an open issue and a central question is how to incorporate and quantify uncertainties due to different modeling assumptions. The present work is intended as a first step in this direction, in the particular case of blood flow in the cerebral venous system. After a careful evaluation of the influence of the computational methodology, the study investigates the impact on the velocity field and the wall shear stress of three inflow boundary conditions, two strategies for treating the outflow boundary condition and two different viscosity models. The results demonstrate that the effect of setting the inflow boundary condition on the forces created by blood flow, is likely greater than for other modeling assumptions, the other important factor being the blood viscosity model, especially in wall shear stress computations. They suggest that improvements on the one hand on the mathematical and computational approach, and on the other hand on available data for their treatment are needed

Boundary conditions involving pressure for the Stokes problem and applications in computational hemodynamics

“…The ingredients include a very expressive embedded language, seamless interpolation, mesh adaption and seamless parallelization. It has been used in various contexts including the development and/or numerical veri cation of (new) mathematical methods or the development of large multi-physics applications [32,9]. The range of users spans from mechanical engineers in industry, physicists in complex uids, computer scientists in biomedical applications to applied mathematicians thanks to the shared common mathematical embedded language hiding linear algebra and computer science complexities.…”

“…We now consider a more realistic context, an application to hemodynamics, which complements a previous work we developed in [9] on blood ow computational modeling in the cerebral venous network.…”

“…In view of these ndings and targeting the validation of the results with respect to experiments, we aim at including more data at di erent levels: (i) geometrical description of the network; (ii) mechanical parameters; (iii) more precise measures at the in ow/out ow boundaries, as predominant factors pointed out in [9]. …”

Blood flow in the cerebral venous system: modeling and simulation

“…For more realistic boundary conditions, we report to another work carried out in the VIVABRAIN project 1 (Chabannes et al (2015)). …”

“…In addition to the arguments developed in Section 3, blood flow simulations in cerebral aneurysms were not sensitive to blood rheology models (Gambaruto et al (2011)). Moreover, the blood viscosity model influences to a lesser extent blood flow computations than the modeling assumptions on the boundary conditions, especially inlet conditions, except when a precise computation of the wall shear stress is needed (Chabannes et al (2015)). …”