The Numerical Study of the Hemodynamic Characteristics in the Patient-Specific Intracranial Aneurysms before and after Surgery

Abstract

The patient-specific pre- and postsurgery cerebral arterial geometries in the study were reconstructed from computed tomography angiography (CTA). Three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics models were used to investigate the hemodynamic phenomena in the cerebral arteries before and after surgery of the aneurysm under realistic conditions. CFD simulations for laminar flow of incompressible Newtonian fluid were conducted by using commercial software, ANSYS v15, with the rigid vascular wall assumption. The study found that the flow patterns with the complex vortical structures inside the aneurysm were similar. We also found that the inflow jet streams were coming strongly in aneurysm sac in the presurgery models, while the flow patterns in postsurgery models were quite different from those in presurgery models. The average wall shear stress after surgery for model 1 was approximately three times greater than that before surgery, while it was about twenty times greater for model 2. The area of low WSS in the daughter saccular aneurysm region in model 2 is associated with aneurysm rupture. Thus the distribution of WSS in aneurysm region provides useful prediction for the risk of aneurysm rupture.