A Blood Flow Modeling Framework for Stroke Treatments

Abstract

Circulatory models can significantly help develop new ways to alleviate the burden of stroke on society. However, it is not always easy to know what hemodynamics conditions to impose on a numerical model or how to simulate porous media, which ineluctably need to be addressed in strokes. We propose a validated open-source, flexible, and publicly available lattice-Boltzmann numerical framework for such problems and present its features in this chapter. Among them, we propose an algorithm for imposing pressure boundary conditions. We show how to use the method developed by Walsh et al. (Comput Geosci 35(6):1186-1193, 2009) to simulate the permeability law of any porous medium. Finally, we illustrate the features of the framework through a thrombolysis model.

Keywords: Computational fluid dynamics; Lattice-Boltzmann; Mesoscopic modeling; Partial bounce-back; Porous media; Stroke treatment.