Parallel Numerical Simulation of Blood Flows in Patient-specific Aortic Dissection

Aortic dissection is the separation of the inner layers of the aortic wall, which allows the blood to flow into it. The computational fluid dynamics allows a better understanding of its pathology and treatment. However, it is time-consuming due to the computationally expensive. In this work, we introduce a parallel algorithm for accurate and fast three-dimensional blood flow simulation of a patient-specific full-size aorta with dissections. Specifically, the unsteady Navier-Stokes equations are discretized by a unstructured finite element method in space and a fully implicit finite difference method in time, and the fully coupled nonlinear system at each time step is solved by a domain decomposition method based parallel scalable iterative algorithm. The numerical results are carefully analyzed and it shows that the simulated pressure, velocity, and wall shear stress are within a reasonable range. In addition, the algorithm achieves a parallel efficiency of 40% when using 3840 processor cores on the Tianhe-2A supercomputer, which shows the potential to do fast and high fidelity blood flow simulations of aortic dissection.

[1]  C V Riga,et al.  Analysis of flow patterns in a patient-specific aortic dissection model. , 2010, Journal of biomechanical engineering.

[2]  C. Nienaber,et al.  Acute aortic dissection: perspectives from the International Registry of Acute Aortic Dissection (IRAD). , 2009, European journal of vascular and endovascular surgery : the official journal of the European Society for Vascular Surgery.

[3]  Stavroula Balabani,et al.  A simplified method to account for wall motion in patient-specific blood flow simulations of aortic dissection: Comparison with fluid-structure interaction. , 2018, Medical engineering & physics.

[4]  R. De Palma,et al.  Acute aortic dissection: epidemiology and outcomes. , 2013, International journal of cardiology.

[5]  F. Auricchio,et al.  A patient-specific follow up study of the impact of thoracic endovascular repair (TEVAR) on aortic anatomy and on post-operative hemodynamics. , 2016 .

[6]  Yue Qiu,et al.  A computational fluid dynamics analysis of a patient with acute non-A-non-B aortic dissection after type I hybrid arch repair. , 2020, Medical engineering & physics.

[7]  Pascal Verdonck,et al.  Intraluminal thrombus and risk of rupture in patient specific abdominal aortic aneurysm - FSI modelling. , 2009, Computer methods in biomechanics and biomedical engineering.

[8]  C Karmonik,et al.  Elevated Wall Shear Stress in Aortic Type B Dissection May Relate to Retrograde Aortic Type A Dissection: A Computational Fluid Dynamics Pilot Study. , 2017, European journal of vascular and endovascular surgery : the official journal of the European Society for Vascular Surgery.

[9]  Kenneth E. Jansen,et al.  A stabilized finite element method for the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations using a hierarchical basis , 2001 .

[10]  Stavroula Balabani,et al.  A Combined In Vivo, In Vitro, In Silico Approach for Patient-Specific Haemodynamic Studies of Aortic Dissection , 2020, Annals of Biomedical Engineering.

[11]  Xiao-Chuan Cai,et al.  Parallel One-Shot Lagrange-Newton-Krylov-Schwarz Algorithms for Shape Optimization of Steady Incompressible Flows , 2012, SIAM J. Sci. Comput..

[12]  J. Steuer,et al.  Sex differences and temporal trends in aortic dissection: a population-based study of incidence, treatment strategies, and outcome in Swedish patients during 15 years , 2020, European heart journal.

[13]  R. Gibbs,et al.  Predicting false lumen thrombosis in patient-specific models of aortic dissection , 2016, Journal of The Royal Society Interface.

[14]  David Nordsletten,et al.  Multi-modality image-based computational analysis of haemodynamics in aortic dissection , 2015, Biomechanics and modeling in mechanobiology.

[15]  Barry F. Smith,et al.  PETSc Users Manual , 2019 .

[16]  Elena S. Di Martino,et al.  Fluid-structure interaction within realistic three-dimensional models of the aneurysmatic aorta as a guidance to assess the risk of rupture of the aneurysm. , 2001, Medical engineering & physics.

[17]  Stavroula Balabani,et al.  Aortic dissection simulation models for clinical support: fluid-structure interaction vs. rigid wall models , 2015, Biomedical engineering online.

[18]  Heow Pueh Lee,et al.  Investigation of hemodynamics in the development of dissecting aneurysm within patient-specific dissecting aneurismal aortas using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. , 2011, Journal of biomechanics.

[19]  Xiao-Chuan Cai,et al.  Simulation of unsteady blood flows in a patient‐specific compliant pulmonary artery with a highly parallel monolithically coupled fluid‐structure interaction algorithm , 2018, International journal for numerical methods in biomedical engineering.