大脳動脈の被験者個別モデルを用いた大規模血流解析

抄録

Cerebrovascular diseases, such as stroke and subarachnoid hemorrhage, have both local and global effects on blood flow. Hemodynamic analysis of large-scale cerebral blood flow is able to quantify the influence of individual anatomical variations in cerebrovasculature on vascular reserve. Although recent high-resolution magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) techniques have elucidated that cerebral arterial trees have significant geometrical variations between individual patients, the effect of individual anatomical variations on the flow behavior in arterial trees have not been fully understood yet. To tackle this challenge, we performed numerical simulations of large-scale cerebral artery blood flow using subject-specific cerebral artery models for 8 patients. Subject-specific arterial tree models were constructed based on MRA data, where vascular walls were interpolated by B-spline curves. The cerebral blood flow was assumed as an incompressible and steady flow, and was solved by the cumulant lattice Boltzmann method. We also resorted the K supercomputer in Japan. We investigated the flow rate distribution in three major cerebral arterial trees: the anterior cerebral artery (ACA), the middle cerebral artery (MCA) and the posterior cerebral artery (PCA), which are branched from the circle of Willis (COW). Since our numerical results of the flow rate in three major cerebral arterial trees well agreed to previous experimental measurements, our numerical model will be helpful to assess the cerebral arterial flow and diagnose some of cerebrovascular diseases for each patient.