Simulation of endovascular interventions of cerebral aneurysms:: Techniques and evaluation

Computer simulations of blood flow past endovascular devices such as coils and stents is important to design better devices as well as for personalizing and optimizing endovascular procedures used to treat cerebral aneurysms. However, the main difficulty lies in the generation of suitable computational grids inside the blood vessels and around the surface of these devices. In this paper, a hybrid method that combines body fitted grids for the vessel walls and adaptive embedded grids for the devices is presented. This approach tremendously simplifies the simulation of blood flows past endovascular devices. The methodology is evaluated with a simple flow past a circular cylinder and illustrated with several idealized aneurysm stenting models and a subject-specific model of aneurysm coiling. These examples demonstrate that the methodology can be used in a wide variety of interesting applications with different levels of geometrical complexity with only a modest increase in effort. This paves the way for using these techniques to evaluate different terapeutic options during the planning phase of endovascular interventions.