11/2 Advanced patient specific computational modeling of the cardiovascular system for surgical planning

		Results of a computational fluid dynamics simulation on an abdominal aortic aneurysm with color-scaled static pressure on the arterial wall and streamlines tracing out the flow.

The relationship between hemodynamics and fluid-solid interactions upon the arterial vessel wall to several vascular diseases has been a subject of intensive study in the aorta and coronary arteries with relation to atherosclerosis development. Hemodynamic indices defined on the wall distributions of static pressure, shear stress, and their respective gradients seem to possess critical values and patterns that correlate with predilection sites of atherosclerosis. The implementation of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) allows one to calculate these values of hemodynamic indices in an in-vitro environment replicating the flow in both the pre- and post-intervention conditions, thereby assisting a physician in surgical planning for the best long-term outcome of the patient.

The extension of the current CFD tool to include a variety of necessary features, including flow-impedance based outflow boundary conditions, is placed in a rigorous experimental validation scheme. The experimental validation takes place using particle tracking velocimetry (PTV) with a flow of a glycerin-water solution through an anatomically accurate transparent silicone replica of a patient-specific abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA), scaled-up by 50% to improve accuracy in the PTV measurements.