Computational Fluid Dynamics Blood Flow Simulation by Patient-Specific Modeling of Aortic and Coronary Outlet

We develop a cardiovascular flow simulation system that performs a flow simulation analysis in patient-specific cardiovascular system and a bypass grafts suggested by a surgeon. In this simulation system, the vessels that are not reflected in the three-dimensional (3D) model of the vessel are modeled by an electrical circuit analogous model, and the simulation is carried out by combining the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis of the vessel 3D model and analysis of the electrical analogous circuit. In order to evaluate the accuracy of the results by this simulation system we analyzed blood flow in cardiovascular system by ANSYS Fluent 19.2. In this paper, we study a method of setting boundary conditions for analyzing blood flow by ANSYS Fluent 19.2. We extract the patient-specific blood pressure (BP) waveforms at the aortic and coronary outlets from the electrical circuit analogous models of blood vessels such as Windkessel model and lumped parameter model. The parameter values of the analogous models are optimized to approximate the measured patient-specific systolic and diastolic pressure. By setting these blood pressure waveforms as outlet boundary conditions, we perform a simulation analysis of three-dimensional vascular model by ANSYS Fluent 19.2 and compare the results such as blood flow rates and blood pressures with clinical measurements. The comparison showed that the relative error in systolic pressure was -3.94~4.42%, diastolic pressure was -2.71~4.43%, and cardiac output was -4.76~4.8%, which demonstrated the accuracy of our boundary modeling and simulation analysis results.

blood flow, cardiovascular, boundary modeling, CFD analysis, analogous model, electrical analogous circuit

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