A comprehensive comparison of various patient-specific CFD models of the left atrium for atrial fibrillation patients

Recently, advances in medical imaging, segmentation techniques, and high-performance computing have supported the use of patient-specific computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. At present, CFD-compatible atrium geometries can be easily reconstructed from atrium images, providing important insight into the atrial fibrillation (AF) phenomenon, and assistance during therapy selection and surgical procedures. However, the hypothesis assumed for such CFD models should be adequately validated.

This work aims to perform an extensive study of the different hypotheses that are commonly assumed when performing atrial simulations for AF patients, as well as to evaluate and compare the range of indices that are usually applied to assess thrombus formation within the left atrium appendage (LAA).

The atrial geometries of two AF patients have been segmented. The resulting geometries have been registered and interpolated to construct a dynamic mesh, which has been employed to compare the rigid and flexible models. Two families of hemodynamic indices have been calculated and compared: wall shear-based and blood age distribution-based.

The findings of this study illustrate the importance of validating the rigid atrium hypothesis when utilizing an AF CFD model. In particular, the absence of the A-wave contraction does not avoid a certain degree of passive atrial contraction, making the rigid model a poor approximation in some cases. Moreover, a new thrombosis predicting index has been proposed, i.e., M4, which has been shown to predict stasis more effectively than other indicators.