Blood Flow at Arterial Branches: Complexities to Resolve for the Angioplasty Suite

This paper presents a case of interdisciplinary collaboration in building and using a set of tools to compute the flows in a branched artery, to compare them with prior physical flow visualization, and to interpret them with further users in mind. The geometry was taken for a typical epicardial coronary artery with a side branch. The incompressible Navier-Stokes equations were solved with the hybrid spectral/hp element solver Nektar. Some simulations were visualized in the CAVE, an immersive 3D stereo display environment, and selected features are described and interpreted.