Rupture risk prediction of intracranial aneurysms using open source CFD software

Abstract

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is an important tool for blood flow simulation in intracranial aneurysms. The objective of this study is to describe CFD patterns in intracranial aneurysms based on simulations in order to interfere with clinical decisions to treat patients with this disease. We randomly selected 8 intracranial aneurysms with good quality CT angiogram (CTA). The open-source VMTK®(Vascular Modeling Toolkit) software was used to create surface models and CFD meshes. The open-source OpenFOAM®CFD solver was used to perform the CFD simulations and ParaView®was used for post-processing. Typical parameters associated with aneurysm rupture, such as wall shear stress (WSS), oscillatory shear index (OSI) and WSS gradient, were evaluated to determine if they may help predict aneurysm rupture probability. We have found regions where the WSS remained low during the entire cardiac cycle combined with high values of OSI and regions where the WSS remained high combined high WSS gradient. We associate these regions with high risk of rupture.