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A Computational Pipeline to Investigate Longitudinal Blood Flow Changes in the Circle of Willis of Patients with Stable and Growing Aneurysms

Alberto Coccarelli Orcid Logo, Raoul van Loon Orcid Logo, Aichi Chien

Annals of Biomedical Engineering, Volume: 52, Pages: 2000 - 2012

Swansea University Authors: Alberto Coccarelli Orcid Logo, Raoul van Loon Orcid Logo

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Abstract

Changes in cerebral blood flow are often associated with the initiation and development of different life-threatening medical conditions including aneurysm rupture and ischemic stroke. Nevertheless, it is not fully clear how haemodynamic changes in time across the Circle of Willis (CoW) are related...

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Published in: Annals of Biomedical Engineering
ISSN: 0090-6964 1573-9686
Published: Springer Nature 2024
Online Access: Check full text

URI: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa65905
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Abstract: Changes in cerebral blood flow are often associated with the initiation and development of different life-threatening medical conditions including aneurysm rupture and ischemic stroke. Nevertheless, it is not fully clear how haemodynamic changes in time across the Circle of Willis (CoW) are related with intracranial aneurysm (IA) growth. In this work, we introduced a novel reduced-order modelling strategy for the systematic quantification of longitudinal blood flow changes across the whole CoW in patients with stable and unstable/growing aneurysm. Magnetic Resonance Angiography (MRA) images were converted into one-dimensional (1-D) vessel networks through a semi-automated procedure, with a level of geometric reconstruction accuracy controlled by user-dependent parameters. The proposed pipeline was used to systematically analyse longitudinal haemodynamic changes in seven different clinical cases. Our preliminary simulation results indicate that growing aneurysms are not necessarily associated with significant changes in mean flow over time. A concise sensitivity analysis also shed light on which modelling aspects need to be further characterized in order to have reliable patient-specific predictions. This study poses the basis for investigating how time-dependent changes in the vasculature affect the haemodynamics across the whole CoW in patients with stable and growing aneurysms.
Keywords: Circle of Willis; Aneurysm development; Cerebral vasculature; One-dimensional blood flow dynamics; Longitudinal study
College: Faculty of Science and Engineering
Funders: Aichi Chien acknowledges the funding provided by Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (R01HL152270).
Start Page: 2000
End Page: 2012