The application of the screen-model based approach for stents in cerebral aneurysms

Numerical modeling of the blood flow through flow diverters in intracranial aneurysms is a crucial tool to personalize and optimize endovascular stenting procedures in the treatment of aneurysms. However, large computational meshes are needed to resolve the difference of scale between the struts of a flow diverter and the blood vessel leads, leading to a high computational cost. This article presents a screen-model based approach, a heuristic continuum method which can effectively reduce the computation time by avoiding to fully resolve the stent. We study the performance of the screen-model based stent model under various conditions, such as different stent placements inside an artery, varying homogeneous porosities, and pulsatile inlet velocities. The results show that the stent model can effectively prevent the blood from flowing into the aneurysm as a fully resolved stent does, but at a coarser resolution. The application range of the stent model is tested, and the validity of the model is assessed.