Modeling and Simulation of Blood Vessel Networks on the Grid

The simulation of the dynamics of the blood flow in the venous network of the lower limb is an important tool for supporting clinical research and for suggesting possible treatments for many diseases, e.g. for enhancing the surgical treatment of chronic venous insufficiency (CVI). A suitable haemodynamic model of the venous network of lower limbs gives information on the dynamics of the venous network and may enable to test new therapeutic strategies and to improve the diagnosis of subtle haemodynamic behaviours, thus allowing better, more consistent care. Nevertheless, the accuracy of the simulation of the blood flow is strictly related to the morphological data characterizing the investigated venous system. Although some of these data can be extracted from the observation of the real blood flow of a patient, the extraction of such values is often performed in a manual way, so the need for the automatic induction of morphological parameters arises. The paper presents an integrated tool that allows (i) the semiautomatic acquisition of the morphological parameters of blood vessel networks, (ii) the building of a lumped parameters model of the network and (ii) the simulation of the dynamics of the network for diagnosis and computer aided surgery. The current version of the proposed tool includes a plugin of the ImageJ platform, that receives in input a DICOM file containing the computerized tomography (CT) of the vessels network of the lower limb and produces in a semi-automatic way a weighted graph of the network, and a Matlab based lumped parameters model that takes in input the network and simulates its dynamics.