Cardiovascular blood flow: comparing measurement and simulation

Facts

Type master project
Place internal
Supervisors Anna Vilanova (BMT), Andrei Jalba
Thesis download
Student Niels de Hoon
start/end date - 12/8/2013

Abstract

In the cardiovascular field, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is increasingly used in healthcare, to obtain non-invasive anatomical patient-specific images. In addition to anatomical images, MRI can be used to evaluate the blood flow within the cardiovascular system. Time-resolved 3D phase-contrast (PC) MRI provides a technique to measure blood flow in three directions at multiple time steps during the cardiac cycle. The acquired PC-MRI blood-flow data is expected to be able to diagnose several cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), and is therefore of great relevance to physicians. With typically twenty measurements per cardiac cycle the data is relatively coarse in the temporal domain.

Due to this coarse temporal domain, linear temporal interpolation is currently used to obtain a velocity field between two measurements. In this study, a novel method is proposed, PC-MRI-measurement integrated (PCMI) simulation. PCMI combines PC-MRI measurements with a fluid simulation from the computer-graphics field, namely the fluid implicit particle (FLIP) method. Our measurement-coupling method was compared to existing techniques using synthetic data, and it was shown that our method was more similar to the measured velocity field, within the physical constraints. Furthermore, noise robustness was shown for noise typical for PC-MRI. A significant difference between linear temporal interpolation and the fluid simulation was demonstrated, however, our technique is likely beneficial due to its use of fluid mechanics. Furthermore, a visual analysis with PC-MRI data was done. This showed that typical blood-flow patterns, in a healthy volunteer and a patient suffering from an aortic dissection, were maintained.

To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to combine full field velocity measurements with fluid simulation instead of defining only the in- and outflow conditions for the simulation. Therefore, we think it is plausible, that our method is more in correspondence with patient's blood flow than conventional measurements coupling techniques, as PCMI is physically underpinned.

assignment/bloodflow.txt ยท Last modified: 2015/12/24 12:17 by huub
Recent changes RSS feed Donate Powered by PHP Valid XHTML 1.0 Valid CSS Driven by DokuWiki