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

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 \(\sim \) 8200 vessels was 0.2 s. 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.