Artery length sensitivity in patient-specific cerebral aneurysm simulations

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Medical Imaging
• Computational Fluid Dynamics

Background:

• Accurate patient-specific aneurysm geometry reconstruction is crucial for reliable hemodynamics simulations.
• The influence of inlet artery length on intra-aneurysmal flow estimations requires further investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze the impact of inlet artery length on hemodynamics simulations in ophthalmic aneurysms.
• To evaluate how truncating the inlet artery affects estimations of velocity, wall shear stress, and oscillatory shear index.

Main Methods:

• Utilized 10 ophthalmic aneurysm models with patient-specific geometries.
• Successively truncated inlet arteries at cavernous and clinoid segments to create models with varying lengths.
• Analyzed velocity, wall shear stress, and oscillatory shear index, comparing truncated models to original geometries.

Main Results:

• Excluding one arterial turn resulted in <18% root mean square error and no visual flow differences in 8/10 models.
• Truncating at the second turn led to 18-32% RMSE, with significant errors in wall shear stress and oscillatory shear index in 5/10 models.
• For 3 models, errors reached 43-55% with substantial visual differences in flow parameter contours.

Conclusions:

• Excluding two arterial turns from ophthalmic aneurysm models significantly alters quantitative flow parameters.
• These alterations can lead to erroneous conclusions in clinical applications of hemodynamics simulations.
• Careful consideration of inlet artery length is essential for accurate patient-specific aneurysm analysis.