Improving Blood Flow Simulations Using Known Data

T. Guerra[1], J. Tiago[2]
[1]Escola Superior de Tecnologia do Barreiro do Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal, Barreiro, Portugal
[2]Instituto Superior Técnico da Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal
Published in 2014

Numerical simulations applied to blood flow together with the imaging processing advances are a powerful tool in the prevention and treatment of some diseases. The inclusion of real data in the numerical blood flow simulations allows the achievement of more realistic and accurate results. In the literature, these techniques are known as Data Assimilation (DA). We solve a variational DA problem to numerically reconstruct the blood flow circulation inside a real artery deformed by a saccular aneurysm obtained from medical images and then imported to COMSOL Multiphysics® software. We propose a weighted cost function that accurately recovers both the velocity and the wall shear stress profiles. The robustness of such cost function is tested with respect to different velocity inlet profiles.