A physiologically realistic virtual patient database for the study of arterial haemodynamics

TL;DR

This paper develops a physiologically realistic virtual patient database for arterial haemodynamics, using Bayesian methods and MCMC sampling, to facilitate the study of arterial diseases and their effects on blood flow and pressure.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework for creating a large, physiologically constrained virtual patient database by integrating available data and constraints through Bayesian modeling and MCMC sampling.

Findings

The final database contains 28,868 virtual patients.

The methodology shows good agreement with real population data.

A filtering process ensures physiologically plausible profiles.

Abstract

This study creates a physiologically realistic virtual patient database (VPD), representing the human arterial system, for the primary purpose of studying the affects of arterial disease on haemodynamics. A low dimensional representation of an anatomically detailed arterial network is outlined, and a physiologically realistic posterior distribution for its parameters is constructed through a Bayesian approach. This approach combines both physiological/geometrical constraints and the available measurements reported in the literature. A key contribution of this work is to present a framework for including all such available information for the creation of virtual patients (VPs). The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method is used to sample random VPs from this posterior distribution, and the pressure and flow-rate profiles associated with the VPs are computed through a model of pulse wave propagation. This combination of the arterial network parameters (representing the VPs) and the haemodynamics waveforms of pressure and flow-rates at various locations (representing functional response of the VPs) makes up the VPD. While 75,000 VPs are sampled from the posterior distribution, 10,000 are discarded as the initial burn-in period. A further 12,857 VPs are subsequently removed due to the presence of negative average flow-rate. Due to an undesirable behaviour observed in some VPs -- asymmetric under- and over-damped pressure and flow-rate profiles in the left and right sides of the arterial system -- a filter is proposed for their removal. The final VPD has 28,868 subjects. It is shown that the methodology is appropriate by comparing the VPD statistics to those reported in literature across real populations. A good agreement between the two is found while respecting physiological/geometrical constraints. The pre-filter database is made available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4549764.