Abstract 235: Integration of Patient-specific Computational Hemodynamics and Vessel Wall Shear Stress Into MRI Diagnosis of Vascular Diseases

The research objective is to expand the capability of current MRI imaging technique in assessing the overall risk and predicted outcomes of atherosclerotic diseases through the quantification of individual patient-specific hemodynamics, including flow, pressure, and wall-shear stress. A unique computational modeling technique, named InVascular, is integrated directly into clinical MRI scanners as the extension of the image reconstruction and post-processing pipeline so that velocity, pressure, vorticity, and WSS can be available immediately with other diagnostic images. InVascular is a unified and GPU accelerated computation platform to model and simulate patient-specific hemodynamics and flow-vessel interaction based on MRI imaging data. In this study, we validate the efficiency and accuracy of InVascular through quantitative hemodynamics in vertebral and carotid arteries. A group of five volunteers participated in the scanning of high resolution time-of-flight (TOF) and low resolution electrocardiogram (ECG) gated phase contrast (PC) MR angiogram (MRA) images. For each case, InVascular successively processes the images to get vessel geometry from TOF MRA and velocity slices from PC MRA and solve the fluid dynamics inside the carotid arteries with PC MRA measured velocity at the inlet and outlet (Fig. 1 a-c). The velocity profiles from Invascular and PC MRA are compared at the same location (Fig. 1 d-g ). We conclude that integration of MRAs and InVascular can well captured the velocity fields as MRI measures. InVascular can provide quantitative pressure and WSS (Fig. 1h ) information as well.