Computational simulation of blood flow and drug transportation in a large vasculature

Abstract

When the blood flow is considered as steady Poiseuille flow, the governing Navier-Stokes equations can be reduced to the Hagen-Poiseuille law. This simplification results in a substantially reduced computational cost which is very useful in real-time blood flow simulations, in particular for large vasculatures containing thousands of blood vessels. By incorporating a convection equation we can also simulate transient drug transportation in the vasculature. In this paper we present at first the implementation of a real-time flow solver which is coupled with a complex arterial tree generated from the Constrained Constructive Optimisation (CCO) algorithm. The computational time for ~ 8200 vessels was 0.2s. Secondly, we simulate the transient drug transportation in the vasculature. Thirdly, we model the delivery of the drug into a tiny tissue block by adopting a 3D diffusion equation. In conclusion the presented computational techniques constitute a pipeline for circulation modelling in multiple scales, and may be used in a variety of biomedical applications.