A Critical Review on Simulating Blood Flow in Human Arterial System

Simulating the blood flow in human arterial system is an important task as it can help us to better understand the human arterial system and hence, cure and/or prevent heart and arterial diseases. From a physical point of view, the blood flow in human arterial system can be considered as a fluid dynamics problem. In the past decades or so, a number of research works have been reported. This paper presents a critical review on the existing works. The review follows a typical simulation process. Firstly, the preprocessing, including the construction of the geometric model, model discretization, material properties and the boundary conditions are discussed. Next, the solving approaches are reviewed with a focus on the 1-D and 3-D simulations as well as the coupling of 1-D and 3-D simulations. Finally, the post-processing methods are discussed. Typical results and their interpretation are given. The future research directions are also discussed.