Impact of patient-specific inflow boundary conditions on intracranial aneurysm hemodynamics

Abstract

For hemodynamic simulations of intracranial aneurysms boundary conditions (BC) are required. In most cases, these are not patient-specific and thus do not reflect the real flow conditions in the patient. This study investigates the influence of patient-specific inflow BC on intra-aneurysmal hemodynamics. The focus lies on gender and age variations of the patients. To asses the impact, four different inflow curves representing the velocity profile of the inflow over one cardiac cycle is modeled. These four inflow BC are varied in the simulations of each aneurysm from selected subgroups. From the results of the simulations, the hemodynamic parameters are determined for each inflow BC and the percent differences between inflow BC are determined. The results show that the hemodynamic parameters are not robust to varying inflow BC. It can be seen that age has more influence on the hemodynamic parameters than gender. This study demonstrates the dependence of valid hemodynamic parameters on realistic inflow BC. Thus, if available, patient-specific inflow curves are recommended.

Keywords

• intracranial aneurysms
• computational fluid dynamics
• hemodynamics
• boundary conditions