Deep Learning Surrogate of Computational Fluid Dynamics for Thrombus Formation Risk in the Left Atrial Appendage

Abstract

Recently, the risk of thrombus formation in the left atrium (LA) has been assessed through patient-specific computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations, characterizing the complex 4D nature of blood flow in the left atrial appendage (LAA). Nevertheless, the vast computational resources and long computing times required by traditional CFD methods prevents its embedding in the clinical workflow of time-sensitive applications. In this study, two distinct deep learning (DL) architectures have been developed to receive the patient-specific LAA geometry as an input and predict the endothelial cell activation potential (ECAP), which is linked to the risk of thrombosis. The first network is based on a simple fully-connected network, while the latter also performs a dimensionality reduction of the variables. Both models have been trained with a synthetic dataset of 210 LAA geometries being able to accurately predict the ECAP distributions with an average error of 4.72% for the fully-connected approach and 5.75% for its counterpart. Most importantly, the obtention of the ECAP predictions was quasi-instantaneous, orders of magnitude faster than conventional CFD.