Patient-Specific Blood Dynamic Simulations in Assessing Endovascular Occlusion of Intracranial Aneurysms

According to recent studies, there are various potential predictors for surgical outcome for cerebral aneurysms. An accurate surgical outcome assessment would help make better-informed decisions and avoid the risk of rebleeding. It is well known that hemodynamic factors play an important role in the pathogenesis and treatment of intracranial aneurysms. In this article, a computational fluid dynamic analysis is applied to one patient-specific model of the cerebral aneurysm located at the tip of basilar artery, by which the differences of hemodynamic parameters before and after endovascular treatment may be evaluated. Based on the model, we show that the flow behavior near the neck of the aneurysm sees great differences after endovascular treatment as compared with that before treatment, which also affects the wall shear stress and the displacement distribution. In addition, our whole simulation process is based on a series of CFD commercial software packages, which are easily available for doctors to implement such a method in their daily practice. These results would be used to assess the outcome of endovascular treatment for the aneurysm occlusion.