Liver cancer arterial perfusion modelling and CFD boundary conditions methodology: a case study of the haemodynamics of a patient‐specific hepatic artery in literature‐based healthy and tumour‐bearing liver scenarios

Abstract

Some of the latest treatments for unresectable liver malignancies (primary or metastatic tumours), which include bland embolisation, chemoembolisation, and radioembolisation, among others, take advantage of the increased arterial blood supply to the tumours to locally attack them. A better understanding of the factors that influence this transport may help improve the therapeutic procedures by taking advantage of flow patterns or by designing catheters and infusion systems that result in the injected beads having increased access to the tumour vasculature. Computational analyses may help understand the haemodynamic patterns and embolic-microsphere transport through the hepatic arteries. In addition, physiological inflow and outflow boundary conditions are essential in order to reliably represent the blood flow through arteries. This study presents a liver cancer arterial perfusion model based on a literature review and derives boundary conditions for tumour-bearing liver-feeding hepatic arteries based on the arterial perfusion characteristics of normal and tumorous liver segment tissue masses and the hepatic artery branching configuration. Literature-based healthy and tumour-bearing realistic scenarios are created and haemodynamically analysed for the same patient-specific hepatic artery. As a result, this study provides boundary conditions for computational fluid dynamics simulations that will allow researchers to numerically study, for example, various intravascular devices used for liver disease intra-arterial treatments with different cancer scenarios. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Computational particle–haemodynamics analysis of liver radioembolization pretreatment as an actual treatment surrogate

“…However, it can be stated that greater tumour involvement means a greater tumour volume and a higher level of neovascularization. By using the model developed by Aramburu et al , a bigger tumour volume with a higher tumour‐tissue perfusion per unit volume leads to a higher tumour‐bearing segmental perfusion. Particles are carried by the bloodstream, so if more blood flows to a certain tumour‐bearing segment, chances are that more particles are directed to that segment, although it has been observed in the present study that local issues are of utmost importance.…”

“…The computational domain studied here is the same as the one studied in Aramburu et al's works and with similar blood flow conditions. The patient‐specific hepatic artery goes from the PHA (the inlet of the computational domain) to the segmental arteries, ending in 29 outlets.…”

“…The inflow and outflow boundary conditions (BCs) for blood are derived by employing the model developed by Aramburu et al . This model derives the BCs by taking into account the normal and tumour volumes at each segment (shown here in Table ), the perfusion parameter (i.e.…”

“…the number of outlets that irrigate a specific segment and the branching level of those outlets. The perfusion parameters in this case are 10 mL/min/100 mL for normal tissue and 41.5 mL/min/100 mL for tumour (colorectal liver metastases) tissue .…”

The role of angled‐tip microcatheter and microsphere injection velocity in liver radioembolization: A computational particle–hemodynamics study

“…To do so, the 3‐dimensional geometric domain of a patient‐specific hepatic artery was reconstructed. This patient‐specific hepatic artery was previously used by the authors . It consists of the proper hepatic artery (PHA), which divides into the right and left hepatic arteries (RHA and LHA), and further splits into 29 segmental and subsegmental branches, perfusing the 8 segments of the liver (with segments as defined by Couinaud).…”