GEPARD – Vessel Wall Simulation and Visualization for Patient-Specific Blood Flow Prediction for Intracranial Aneurysm Modeling

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Intracranial aneurysms are pathologic dilations of human brain vessels. They may cause a rupture leading to death or irreversible disabilities. Therefore, computer-assisted, numerical methods are developed and applied to assess the patient-specific rupture risk as well as to support the treatment planning of the clinician. At the moment, only the aneurysm lumen is evaluated. Since the rupture often depends on inflammations of the intracranial vessel wall, current simulation and computer-supported evaluation approaches have to integrate the wall. This project promotes the integration of intracranial vessel wall information and extravascular structures such that clinical information about the rupture risk can be extracted. The project pursues three objectives:1) Extraction of patient-specific vessel wall thicknesses via segmentation of ex-vivo acquired optical coherence tomography data for the fluid-structure interaction of simulated blood flow and cerebral artery wall2) Differentiation of individual vessel wall layers and specific vessel wall pathologies to conduct mechanical measurements to formulate material laws and to allow complex, interactive visualizations of fluid-structure simulations3) Integration of extravascular structures into the visualization and simulation of vessel-surrounding areas for the computer-assisted evaluation of aneurysm growth and movementThe implementation of the stated subgoals leads to the overall objective to support treating physicians in their patient-individual therapy planning. The resulting system allows for a realistic and reliable blood flow prediction with especially adapted visualization techniques. It provides the medical user with the newly extracted information defined in the proposal and thus considerably improves the evaluation of intracranial aneurysms.