Vascular flow simulation directly from medical images to support virtual treatment planning

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations can assist in treatment planning for cardio/cerebrovascular interventions. This  project involves the development of fully-automatic images-to-simulation workflows that can be translated to clinical practice by developing new CFD methods that can be applied directly on the medical images, without need for manual vessel segmentation and volume meshing. The flow equations will be solved using the immersed boundary -method, which doesn't require body-fitting meshes to be generated. The CFD models will be validated against 4D FLOW cardiac magnetic resonance -images. Applications of the methods include interventional treatment planning of cerebral aneurysms and congenital cardiac disease.

Figure 1: Virtual treatment planning model for flow diversion in cerebral, analysis of post-treatment clotting in two different flow scenarios (courtesy of Dr Ali Sarrami-Foroushani)