Patient-specific computational analysis of the influence of a stent on the unsteady flow in cerebral aneurysms

We present a patient-specific computational analysis of the influence of a stent on the unsteady flow in cerebral aneurysms. The analysis is based on four different arterial models extracted form medical images, and the stent is placed across the neck of the aneurysm to reduce the flow circulation in the aneurysm. The core computational technique used in the analysis is the space–time (ST) version of the variational multiscale (VMS) method and is called “DSD/SST-VMST”. The special techniques developed for this class of cardiovascular fluid mechanics computations are used in conjunction with the DSD/SST-VMST technique. The special techniques include NURBS representation of the surface over which the stent model and mesh are built, mesh generation with a reasonable resolution across the width of the stent wire and with refined layers of mesh near the arterial and stent surfaces, modeling the double-stent case, and quantitative assessment of the flow circulation in the aneurysm. We provide a brief overview of the special techniques, compute the unsteady flow patterns in the aneurysm for the four arterial models, and investigate in each case how those patterns are influenced by the presence of single and double stents.