Simulation of blood flow in patient-specific cerebral arteries with a domain decomposition method

Abstract

We simulate blood flow in patient-specific cerebral arteries. The complicated geometry in the human brain makes the problem challenging. We use a fully unstructured three dimensional mesh to cover the artery, and Galerkin/least-squares finite element method to discretize the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, that are employed to model the blood flow, and the resulting large sparse nonlinear system of equations is solved by a Newton-Krylov-Schwarz algorithm. From the computed flow fields, we are able to understand certain behavior of the blood flow of this particular patient before and after a stenosis is surgically removed. We also report the robustness and parallel performance of the domain decomposition based algorithm.