Numerical Simulation of Blood Flows in Patient-specific Abdominal Aorta with Primary Organs

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Computational Fluid Dynamics
• Medical Imaging

Background:

• The abdominal aorta supplies blood to vital organs via complex branching arteries.
• Accurate simulation of blood flow is crucial for understanding organ hemodynamics but computationally expensive.
• Existing methods often simplify arterial networks or use low-dimensional approximations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a parallel algorithm for modeling pulsatile blood flow in the abdominal aorta with visceral branches.
• To introduce an organ-based two-level method for calculating outflow boundary conditions.
• To enable accurate and efficient simulation of blood flow and distribution within a cardiac cycle.

Main Methods:

• A highly parallel algorithm was developed for modeling pulsatile flows in the abdominal aorta and its branches.
• An organ-based two-level method was used to calculate resistances for outflow boundary conditions.
• The algorithm's scalability was tested using up to 3000 processor cores.

Main Results:

• The parallel approach significantly reduces computational cost, allowing simulation of a cardiac cycle within hours.
• Accurate computation of blood distribution to organs like the liver, spleen, and kidneys was achieved.
• Hemodynamic differences due to peripheral branches were analyzed.
• High parallel scalability was demonstrated.

Conclusions:

• The proposed parallel algorithm offers an efficient and accurate method for simulating abdominal aorta hemodynamics.
• This approach facilitates detailed analysis of blood flow and distribution to vital organs.
• The method shows excellent scalability for complex cardiovascular simulations.