ECCOMAS 2024

Towards Modeling the Pre and Postoperative State of Cerebral Aneurysms

  • Frank, Martin (University of the Bundeswehr Munich (IMCS))
  • Mayr, Matthias (University of the Bundeswehr Munich (IMCS))
  • Popp, Alexander (University of the Bundeswehr Munich (IMCS))

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A cerebral aneurysm is a bulge that develops from a weak spot in the wall of a blood vessel in the brain. While the rupture of such an aneurysm often leads to severe disability or death of thousands of patients every year, there are several endovascular treatment options to prevent the vessel wall from rupturing. In these minimally invasive surgical procedures, a medical device such as a coil or WEB (WovenEndoBridge) is inserted into the bulge or, the blood flow is diverted with a flow diverter. The goal of all these interventions is to reduce the blood flow inside the aneurysm to trigger the coagulation of the blood in the aneurysm and, thus, achieve the complete occlusion of the aneurysm sac. In order to support clinical planning and therapy, various models are required to accurately represent the corresponding treatment steps. These models range from the untreated state before the intervention, typically based on CFD models, to the final state of the treatment procedure. In the latter case, various medical devices can be represented either explicitly or with the assistance of surrogate models. To model devices as webs or coils, a poro-elastic single-domain approach is used. In this modeling approach, the device and the blood in the artery are treated as a homogenized, poro-elastic medium. Since the treated aneurysm interacts with arterial blood flow, the different settings for the single-domain approach will be discussed to model a deformable interaction between the device and the surrounding blood flow. In this presentation, we will outline our modeling approaches and demonstrate their application, ranging from parametric geometries for the porous media model to patient-specific geometries for the CFD model of an aneurysm. In particular, we will assess the validity of our models corresponding to the modeling assumptions and give an outlook on future work.