IMPORTANCE AND SENSITIVITY OF MRI SEGMENTATION TO GEOMETRY RECONSTRUCTION FOR CFD SIMULATIONS.

Alberto Gambaruto1, Alessandro Radaelli1, Joaquim Peiro1, Denis J Doorly1

1Department

of Aeronautics, South Kensington Campus, Imperial College London.

INTRODUCTION The aim of current research is to produce computational tools for clinicians to automatically identify the key topological parameters affecting user-specific blood flow interpretation. In current studies we assess the sensitivity of the vascular geometry reconstruction to topology simplification and flow simulation.

CASE STUDY We present the results of a case study where the surface smoothing induces a 26% decrease in the curvature while approximately maintaining the cross-sectional area. The different thresholds used in the segmentation of the MRI image stack produced geometries with mean closest distance is within 1 pixel of the MR images. The CFD simulations were run for steady laminar flow with Poiseuille inflow conditions equivalent to Re=135 and the mass flow split was 60% distal and 40% proximal. The Wall shear stress is used as an indication of the flow solution to allow for comparison of topological differences.

Z Y X

MRI stack Clinical interpretation of CFD

CFD results A B C

FIGURE 1 METHODS

Image acquisition

To perform a study on the effects of geometry reconstruction and topology simplification to the flow solution, three similar geometries are obtained, see figure 2. The reconstruction of the vessel wall is performed by segmenting an MRI stack of images, by choice of a grey-scale threshold value, to find the vessel wall contours for each image slice. These contours are then interpolated using an implicit function formulation. Simplification of the reconstructed vessel wall is carried out by an iterative procedure which reduces the curvature, allowing for local features to change while preserving the global characteristics.
bypass

T1 vs. T1-SMOOTH

T1 vs. T2

Segmentation and MIP visualization

3D implicit surface reconstruction and rendering

High-order mesh generation

FIGURE 3
Maps of the closest point distance (A, D) normalised to the local vessel radius; wall shear stress difference (B, E) normalised to the local wall shear stress; scatter plot with least squares best fit (C, F) for normalised closest point and normalised wall shear stress difference.

CLOSING REMARKS The line of best fit indicates a local correspondence between the normalised distance moved due to the smoothing process and the normalised wall shear stress difference. It can be seen that there is a more evident correlation in the T1 vs. T1-SMOOTH comparison, and to some extend a sense of local predictability. Furthermore such results indicate that the wall shear stress is less sensitive to the quantity of surface smoothing as opposed to thresholding uncertainties. In fact we note a 12% difference in global mean wall shear due to smoothing as opposed to a 29% difference due to different thresholding. These observations have been noticed in other cases. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank Prof. David Firman and the Royal Brompton Hospital for the support with the MRI data.

proximal

distal

T1 FIGURE 2

T1-SMOOTH

T2

Reconstructed vessel geometries. Topology T1 is obtained by using a constant threshold value from the MRI stack; T1-SMOOTH is the idealisation of geometry T1 and is obtained by using a curvature minimising iterative procedure. T2 is obtained by using a different threshold value in segmentation of the MRI slices.