Efficient Parallel Simulation of Blood Flows in Abdominal Aorta

TL;DR

This paper introduces a highly parallel, scalable algorithm for simulating unsteady blood flows in the abdominal aorta, significantly reducing computation time while maintaining accuracy, which could enhance rupture-risk assessment.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel parallel domain decomposition method for blood flow simulation that achieves high efficiency and accuracy in less than an hour.

Findings

Flow simulation completed in less than an hour

Parallel efficiency exceeds 70% on 1,000+ cores

Accurate pressure, velocity, and wall shear stress results

Abstract

It is known that the maximum diameter for the rupture-risk assessment of the abdominal aortic aneurysm is a generally good method, but not sufficient. Alternative features obtained with computational modeling may provide additional useful criteria. Though computational approaches are noninvasive, they are often time-consuming because of the high computational complexity. In this paper, we present a highly parallel algorithm for the numerical simulation of unsteady blood flows in the patient-specific abdominal aorta. We model the blood flow with the unsteady incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, and solve the discretized system with a highly scalable domain decomposition method. With this approach, the complete flow field can be obtained in less than an hour, instead of days with older methods. We show experimentally that the proposed method offers accurate solutions of the pressure, the velocity and the wall shear stress, and the parallel efficiency is higher than 70% on a parallel computer with more than 1,000 processor cores.