Auto-regulation and blood flow in the cerebral circulation

The application of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to model biological flows is quite a recent one. This study presents a CFD model of the Circle of Willis developed to simulate the human cerebrovascular tree. Specifically, we aim to show firstly how the auto-regulation mechanism can be modelled and secondly how smaller arteries, often not visible by non-intrusive MR studies, can be detected by making use of the results obtained from the computer simulation. Results show the time-varying mass flow in each of the efferent vessels and how collateral vessels are even used in naturally ʹbalancedʹ configurations.