Deep neural networks for fast acquisition of aortic 3D pressure and velocity flow fields

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that machine learning models can rapidly and accurately replicate traditional CFD simulations of aortic blood flow, potentially enabling real-time clinical assessments.

Contribution

The paper introduces a machine learning approach that automates and accelerates aortic CFD simulations, achieving high accuracy and significantly reducing computation time.

Findings

ML models achieved ~6% pressure error and ~4% velocity error.

Simulation time was reduced to approximately 0.075 seconds.

The approach enables fast, automatic CFD-like analysis for clinical use.

Abstract

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) can be used to simulate vascular haemodynamics and analyse potential treatment options. CFD has shown to be beneficial in improving patient outcomes. However, the implementation of CFD for routine clinical use is yet to be realised. Barriers for CFD include high computational resources, specialist experience needed for designing simulation set-ups, and long processing times. The aim of this study was to explore the use of machine learning (ML) to replicate conventional aortic CFD with automatic and fast regression models. Data used to train/test the model consisted of 3,000 CFD simulations performed on synthetically generated 3D aortic shapes. These subjects were generated from a statistical shape model (SSM) built on real patient-specific aortas (N=67). Inference performed on 200 test shapes resulted in average errors of 6.01% +/-3.12 SD and 3.99% +/-0.93 SD for pressure and velocity, respectively. Our ML-based models performed CFD in +/-0.075 seconds (4,000x faster than the solver). This proof-of-concept study shows that results from conventional vascular CFD can be reproduced using ML at a much faster rate, in an automatic process, and with high accuracy.