Pressure-Poisson Equation in Numerical Simulation of Cerebral Arterial Circulation and Its Effect on the Electrical Conductivity of the Brain

TL;DR

This paper develops a novel modeling framework that integrates pressure-Poisson equations with MRI data to simulate cerebral blood flow and its impact on brain electrical conductivity, enhancing electrophysiological brain models.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach combining pressure-Poisson equations, Hagen-Poiseuille boundary conditions, and Archie's law to estimate blood flow effects on brain conductivity from 7T MRI data.

Findings

Electrical conductivity perturbations match previous studies

Effective blood pressure estimation from MRI data

New MRI-based conductivity atlas incorporating blood flow effects

Abstract

This study considers dynamic modelling of the cerebral arterial circulation and reconstructing an atlas for the electrical conductivity of the brain. While high-resolution 7-Tesla (T) Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data allow for reconstructing the cerebral arteries with a cross-sectional diameter larger than the voxel size, electrical conductivity cannot be directly inferred from MRI data. Brain models of electrophysiology typically associate each brain tissue compartment with a constant electrical conductivity, omitting any dynamic effects of cerebral blood circulation. Incorporating those effects poses the challenge of solving a system of incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in a realistic multi-compartment head model. We postulate that circulation in the distinguishable arteries can be estimated via the pressure-Poisson equation, which is coupled with Fick's law of diffusion for microcirculation. To establish a fluid exchange model between arteries and microarteries, a boundary condition derived from the Hagen-Poisseuille model is applied. The relationship between the estimated volumetric blood concentration and the electrical conductivity of the brain tissue is approximated through Archie's law for fluid flow in porous media. Through the formulation of the PPE and a set of boundary conditions based on the Hagen-Poisseuille model, we obtained an equivalent formulation of the incompressible Stokes equation. Thus, allowing effective blood pressure estimation in cerebral arteries segmented from open 7T MRI data. As a result of this research, we developed and built a useful modelling framework that accounts for the effects of dynamic blood flow on a novel MRI-based electrical conductivity atlas. The electrical conductivity perturbation obtained in numerical experiments has an appropriate overall match with previous studies on this subject.