Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
13
Quality open source mesh generation for
cardiovascular flow simulations
Emilie Marchandise, Paolo Crosetto, Christophe Geuzaine,
Jean-Fran¸ois Remacle, and Emilie Sauvage
Abstract.
We present efficient algorithms for generating quality tetrahedral meshes
for cardiovascular blood flow simulations starting from low quality triangulations
obtained from the segmentation of patient specific medical images. The suite of al-
gorithms that are presented in this paper have been implemented in the open-source
mesh generator Gmsh [19]. This includes a high quality remeshing algorithm based
on a finite element conformal parametrization and a volume meshing algorithm with
a boundary layer generation technique. In the result section, we show that the pres-
ence of a boundary layer mesh plays an important role to reduce the problem size in
cardiovascular flow simulations.
13.1 Introduction
Blood flow dynamics and arterial wall mechanics are thought to be an important fac-
tor in the pathogenesis and treatment of cardiovascular diseases. A number of spe-
cific hemodynamic and vascular mechanic factors - notably wall shear stress (WSS),
pressure and mural stress, flow rate, and residence time - have been implicated in
aneurysm growth and rupture [8, 39] or in the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis [25].
Judicious control of these hemodynamic factors may also govern the outcomes of
vascular therapies [21, 22]. Blood flow simulations with either rigid or compliant
Emilie Marchandise ( ), Emilie Sauvage, Jean-Fran¸ois Remacl
Universite catholique de Louvain, Institute of Mechanics, Materials and Civil Engineering (iMMC),
Belgium
e-mail:
emilie.marchandise,emilie.sauvage,jean-francois.remacle
@uclouvain.be
{
}
Paolo Crosetto
Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland
e-mail: paolo.crosetto@epfl.ch
Christophe Geuzaine
Universit´edeLiege, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Liege, Belgium
e-mail: cgeuzaine@ulg.ac.be
