Multiscale modeling of cerebral blood flow

A multiscale model of the human cerebral vasculature has been developed which includes a three-dimensional (3D) CFD model of the circle of Willis (CoW) and fractal tree models of all regions of small cerebral vasculature, namely Anterior, Middle and Posterior Cerebral Arteries (ACA, MCA, PCA). The realistic 3D CoW model was constructed from the medical imaging data with the use of 3D Slicer segmentation software. The flow model in the fractal tree models of ACA, MCA and PCA has been developed with the effects of blood vessel structural property, arterial size-dependent blood viscosity and nonparabolic velocity profile incorporated. The coupling of the CFD model (solved with ANSYS CFX) and the fractal tree models (solved with Matlab mathematic library) has been extended from one-way to two-way method in this work. The coupled model has been used to predict the transient blood flow in cerebral arteries and study the effect of occlusion on flow distribution in the brain.