VMTK – Fluent – RBF Morph: A New Workflow For Hemodynamic Applications

Engineering applications involving biological fluids have highly transversal requirements in terms of domain definition from clinical images, complex flow conditions, fluid rheological properties, structure motion and deformation, visualization and post-processing of the results. For these reasons, and thanks to the enormous developments of computational sciences, a computer – aided –engineering workflow seems to be a possible elective environment where to perform hemodynamics studies and medical device design.

Today a large part of the technological requirements needed to tackle these problems in a computational environment are already available in open source and/or commercial software. Nevertheless, success still strongly depends on technical knowledge and best practice or in other word ideas must be translated into stable and usable implementations. In this work we present a new workflow based on three fully validated software used to elegantly fulfill the requirements related to hemodynamics: the Vascular Modeling Toolkit (VMTK) for the pre-processing step; the RBF Morph mesh morphing tool to impose changes to the vascular anatomy; Ansys Fluent as Navier-Stokes solver and CFD modeler.

As a first test case we focused our attention on the study of a subject-specific carotid bifurcation being this anatomical site of major interest in hemodynamics.

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