Patient-specific modeling of intracranial aneurysmal stenting

Asbtract

Simulating blood flow around stents in intracranial aneurysms is important for designing better stents and to personalize and optimize endovascular stenting procedures in the treatment of these aneurysms. However, the main difficulty lies in the generation of acceptable computational grids inside the blood vessels and around the stents. In this paper, a hybrid method that combines body-fitted grid for the vessel walls and adaptive embedded grids for the stent is presented. Also an algorithm to map a particular stent to the parent vessel is described. These approaches tremendously simplify the simulation of blood flow past these devices. The methodology is evaluated with an idealized stented aneurysm under steady flow conditions and demonstrated in various patient-specific cases under physiologic pulsatile flow conditions. These examples show that the methodology can be used with ease in modeling any patient-specific anatomy and using different stent designs. This paves the way for using these techniques during the planning phase of endovascular stenting interventions, particularly for aneurysms that are difficult to treat with coils or by surgical clipping.