Transient wall shear stress estimation in coronary bifurcations using convolutional neural networks

Haemodynamic metrics, such as blood flow induced shear stresses at the inner vessel lumen, are associated with the development and progression of coronary artery disease. Understanding these metrics may therefore improve the assessment of an individual's coronary disease risk. However, the calculation of such luminal Wall Shear Stress (WSS) using traditional Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) methods is relatively slow and computationally expensive. As a result, CFD based haemodynamic computation is not suitable for integrated and large-scale use in clinical settings.

In this work, deep learning techniques are proposed as an alternative method to CFD, whereby luminal WSS magnitude can be predicted in coronary bifurcations throughout the cardiac cycle based on the steady state solution (which takes <120 seconds to calculate including preprocessing), vessel geometry and additional global features. The deep learning model is trained on a dataset of 101 patient-specific and 2626 synthetic left main bifurcation models with 26 separate patient-specific cases used as the test set.

The model showed high fidelity predictions with <5% (normalised against mean WSS magnitude) deviation to CFD derived values as the gold-standard method, while being orders of magnitude faster with on average <2 minutes versus 3 hours computation for transient CFD.

This method therefore offers a new approach to substantially reduce the computational cost involved in, for example, large-scale population studies of coronary haemodynamic metrics, and may therefore open the pathway for future clinical integration.