A Fast Alternative to Computational Fluid Dynamics for High Quality Imaging of Blood Flow

Obtaining detailed, patient-specific blood flow information would be very useful in detecting and monitoring cardio-vascular diseases. Current approaches rely on computational fluid dynamics to achieve this; however, these are hardly usable in the daily clinical routine due to the required technical supervision and long computing times. We propose a fast measurement enhancement method that requires neither supervision nor long computation and it is the objective of this paper to evaluate its performance as compared to the state-of-the-art. To this end a large set of abdominal aortic bifurcation geometries was used to test this technique and the results were compared to measurements and numerical simulations. We find that this method is able to dramatically improve the quality of the measurement information, in particular the flow-derived quantities such as wall shear stress. Additionally, good estimation of unmeasurable quantities such as pressure can be provided. We demonstrate that this approach is a practical and clinically feasible alternative to fully-blown, time-consuming, patient-specific flow simulations.