Hemodynamic flow modeling through an abdominal aorta aneurysm using data mining tools

Abstract

Geometrical changes of blood vessels, called aneurysm, occur often in humans with possible catastrophic outcome. Then, the blood flow is enormously affected, as well as the blood hemodynamic interaction forces acting on the arterial wall. These forces are the cause of the wall rupture. A mechanical quantity characteristic for the bloodwall interaction is the wall shear stress, which also has direct physiological effects on the endothelial cell behavior. Therefore, it is very important to have an insight into the blood flow and shear stress distribution when an aneurysm is developed in order to help correlating the mechanical conditions with the pathogenesis of pathological changes on the blood vessels. This insight can further help in improving the prevention of cardiovascular diseases evolution. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been used in general as a tool to generate results for the mechanical conditions within blood vessels with and without aneurysms. However, aneurysms are very patient specific and reliable results from CFD analyses can be obtained by a cumbersome and time-consuming process of the computational model generation followed by huge computations. In order to make the CFD analyses efficient and suitable for future everyday clinical practice, we have here employed data mining (DM) techniques. The focus was to combine the CFD and DM methods for the estimation of the wall shear stresses in an abdominal aorta aneurysm (AAA) underprescribed geometrical changes. Additionally, computing on the grid infrastructure was performed to improve efficiency, since thousands of CFD runs were needed for creating machine learning data. We used several DM techniques and found that our DM models provide good prediction of the shear stress at the AAA in comparison with full CFD model results on real patient data. © 2006 IEEE.