INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR NUMERICAL METHODS IN BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING Int. J. Numer. Meth. Biomed. Engng. 2010; 00:1–26 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/cnm 4D Image-Based CFD Simulation of a Compliant Blood Vessel Marina Piccinelli 1∗ , Lucia Mirabella 2 , Tiziano Passerini 1 , Eldad Haber 3 , Alessandro Veneziani 1,2 1 Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Emory University, Atlanta (GA), USA, 2 Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta (GA), USA 3 Department of Mathematics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada SUMMARY Numerical simulation of fluid-structure interaction (FSI) in the arterial system is a challenging and time consuming procedure because of the intrinsic heterogeneous nature of the problem. Moreover, in patient- specific simulations, modeling of the vascular structure requires parameter identification still difficult to accomplish. On the other hand, new imaging devices provide time sequences of the moving vessel of interest. When one is interested only in the blood dynamics in the compliant vessel, a possible alternative to the full fluid-structure interaction simulation is to track the vessel displacement from the images and then to solve the fluid problem in the moving domain reconstructed accordingly. In this paper, we present an example of this image-based technique. We describe the steps necessary for this approach (image acquisition and 3D geometric reconstruction, motion tracking, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation) and present some results referring to an aortic arch and a validation of the proposed technique vs. a traditional FSI simulation in a carotid bifurcation. This approach significantly reduces the CPU time since the dynamics of the structure is retrieved from the images instead of being numerically computed. This work places itself in the framework of a strong integration between data (images/measures) and simulations that is likely to introduce a significant improvement in the reliability of cardiovascular numerical mathematics. Copyright c  2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received . . . KEY WORDS: Cardiovascular Mathematics, Computational Hemodynamics, Surface Registration, Patient Specific CFD, ALE Formulation 1. INTRODUCTION During the last years, numerical simulations have been extensively adopted for investigating the physiology and pathology of the cardiovascular system. Accurate mathematical and numerical modeling of blood flow problems allows the computation of physical quantities relevant for both their comprehension and for virtual prediction, resulting in a potentially remarkable tool for supporting clinical decisions (see e.g. [29, 20, 21, 52]). One of the most challenging aspects in the mathematical and numerical modeling of the cardiovascular system is the fluid-structure interaction (FSI) between blood and vascular wall. There are two main reasons still making this a difficult problem. (a) Modeling: there is a common agreement in considering the model proposed in [26] a reliable description of the vascular wall * Correspondence to: Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Emory University, Atlanta (GA), USA Contract/grant sponsor: Emory URC Project: Image based numerical fluid structure interactions simulations in computational hemodynamics (2008) Copyright c  2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Prepared using cnmauth.cls [Version: 2010/03/27 v2.00]