Intracranial hemodynamics simulations: An efficient and accurate immersed boundary scheme

TL;DR

This paper introduces an efficient immersed boundary scheme for intracranial hemodynamics simulations that simplifies mesh generation and maintains accuracy, enabling large-scale CFD studies of aneurysms.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel immersed boundary method using Cartesian grids and automated mesh generation for accurate and efficient intracranial blood flow simulations.

Findings

Verified accuracy against experimental data

Successfully simulated four patient-specific aneurysms

Demonstrated computational efficiency for complex geometries

Abstract

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) studies have been increasingly used for blood flow simulations in intracranial aneurysms (ICAs). However, despite the continuous progress of body-fitted CFD solvers, generating a high quality mesh is still the bottleneck of the CFD simulation, and strongly affects the accuracy of the numerical solution. To overcome this challenge, which will allow preforming CFD simulations efficiently for a large number of aneurysm cases we use an Immersed Boundary (IB) method. The proposed scheme relies on Cartesian grids to solve the incompressible Navier-Stokes (N-S) equations, using a finite element solver, and Lagrangian points to discretize the immersed object. All grid generations are conducted through automated algorithms which require no user input. Consequently, we verify the proposed method by comparing our numerical findings (velocity values) with published experimental results. Finally, we test the ability of the scheme to efficiently handle hemodynamic simulations on complex geometries on a sample of four patient-specific intracranial aneurysms.