Open Access

ARTICLE

High-Fidelity Tetrahedral Mesh Generation from Medical Imaging Data for Fluid-Structure Interaction Analysis of Cerebral Aneurysms

Yongjie Zhang¹, Wenyan Wang¹, Xinghua Liang¹, Yuri Bazilevs², Ming-Chen Hsu², Trond Kvamsdal³, Reidar Brekken⁴, Jørgen Isaksen⁵

1 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
2 Department of Structural Engineering, University of California - San Diego, USA
3 Department of Applied Mathematics, SINTEF Information and Communication Technology, Trondheim, Norway
4 Department of Medical Technology, SINTEF Health Research, Trondheim, Norway
5 Department of Neurosurgery, University Hospital of North Norway, Tromsø, Norway

Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences 2009, 42(2), 131-150. https://doi.org/10.3970/cmes.2009.042.131

Abstract

This paper describes a comprehensive and high-fidelity finite element meshing approach for patient-specific arterial geometries from medical imaging data, with emphasis on cerebral aneurysm configurations. The meshes contain both the blood volume and solid arterial wall, and are compatible at the fluid-solid interface. There are four main stages for this meshing method: 1) Image segmentation and geometric model construction; 2) Tetrahedral mesh generation for the fluid volume using the octree-based method; 3) Mesh quality improvement stage, in which edge-contraction, pillowing, optimization, geometric flow smoothing, and mesh cutting are applied to the fluid mesh; and 4) Mesh generation for the blood vessel wall based on the boundary layer generation technique. The constructed meshes are extensively employed in a fully-coupled fluid-structure interaction analysis of vascular blood flow. This paper presents several case studies of hemodynamics in patient-specific cerebral aneurysms.

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Keywords

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