Automatic reconstruction of a patient-specific high-order surface representation and its application to mesh generation for CFD calculations

We describe a set of procedures for the shape reconstruction and mesh generation of unstructured high-order spatial discretization of patient-specific geometries from a series of medical images and for the simulation of flows in these meshes using a high-order hp-spectral solver. The reconstruction of the shape of the boundary is based on the interpolation of an implicit function through a set of points obtained from the segmentation of the images. This approach is favoured for its ability of smoothly interpolating between sections of different topology. The boundary of the object is initially represented as an iso-surface of an implicit function defined in terms of radial basis functions. This surface is approximated by a triangulation extracted by the method of marching cubes. The triangulation is then suitably smoothed and refined to improve its quality and permit its approximation by a quilt of bi-variate spline surface patches. Such representation is often the standard input format required for state-of-the-art mesh generators. The generation of the surface patches is based on a partition of the triangulation into Voronoi regions and dual Delaunay triangulations with an even number of triangles. The quality of the triangulation is optimized by imposing that the distortion associated with the energy of deformation by harmonic maps is minimized. Patches are obtained by merging adjacent triangles and this representation is then used to generate a mesh of linear elements using standard generation techniques. Finally, a mesh of high-order elements is generated in a bottom-up fashion by creating the additional points required for the high-order interpolation and projecting them on the edges and surfaces of the quilt of patches. The methodology is illustrated by generating meshes for a by-pass graft geometry and calculating high-order CFD solutions in these meshes.