Numerical simulation system of blood flow-in the cerebral artery using CT image data

Abstract

Over 90% of subarachnoid hemorrhage is caused by rupture of a cerebral aneurysm. The medical statistics indicate that the cerebral aneurysm occurs predominantly in the arteries branching off with a sharp curvature where the flow and wall shear stress change abruptly. In this paper, a system for analizing the flow in the cerebral artery has been constructed. In this system, a numerical simulation have been conducted for a geometry, which is extracted from computed tomographic angiography of the cerebral artery. The boundary conditions, which is modeled from measured data is prescribed to simulate the hemodynamics in the real situation. This system investigates an effect of geometry on the wall shear stress distribution and the flow pattern in the artery. As the result, the wall shear stress concentrates on some specific areas due to the effect of the curvature.