Evaluation of the Effect of Simplified and Patient-specific Arterial Geometry on Hemodynamic Flow in Stenosed Carotid Bifurcation Arteries

Numerous CFD studies have been performed on the motivation to elucidate the role of hemodynamic forces in the development of atherosclerosis in the coronary arteries and the carotid bifurcation artery. In order to improve CFD predictions, and to consider CFD as a clinical diagnostic or treatment planning tool, there is a need to ensure its accuracy and reliability through a systematic approach of comparing simplified geometries to patient-specific geometries. There is also a need to compare numerical results with clinical data for validation and verification. In this paper, comparisons of 3-D pulsatile blood flow through a simplified stenosed carotid bifurcation arterial geometry and two stenosed patient-specific carotid bifurcation arterial geometries were simulated using CFD. The goal was to quantify the efficacy of arterial vessel geometry on hemodynamic flow parameters (velocity, wall shear stress, and vorticity) with the same grade of stenosis for all models. The main conclusion in this work is that dynamic behaviors of blood through the patient-specific carotid bifurcation arterial geometries based on numerical approaches show differences when compared to a simplified carotid bifurcation geometry. Keywords—atherosclerosis, geometry, hemodynamics, modeling, patient-specific, simplified, velocity, vorticity, and wall shear stress