Air-flow simulation in realistic models of the trachea

In this article we present preliminary results from a new technique for flow simulation in realistic anatomical airways. The airways are extracted by means of Level-Sets methods that accurately model the complex and varying surfaces of anatomical objects. The surfaces obtained are defined at the sub-pixel level where they intersect the Cartesian grid of the image domain. It is therefore straightforward to construct embedded boundary representations of these objects on the same grid, for which recent work has enabled discretization of the Navier-Stokes equations for incompressible fluids. While most classical techniques require construction of a structured mesh that approximates the surface in order to extrapolate a 3D finite-element griding of the whole volume, our method directly simulates the air-flow inside the extracted surface without losing any complicated details and without building additional grids.