FSI Simulation of Aortic Dissection
Aortic dissection is a cardiovascular disease characterized by a splitting
process within the medial wall part. Initiated by trauma due to surgery or accidents its result is an inner wall part (dissecting membrane) separating the lumen into a "true" and a "false" lumen part. Aortic dissection is a critical state attending high risk of death.
To be able to help in the understanding of the development of the disease which can then lead to improvements of clinical methods and management of patients, numerical simulations can play an important role. To obtain reliable predictions the complex interplay between structural wall mechanics and hemodynamics has to be considered. This is achieved by FSI-algorithms. Furthermore much value has to be put on the correct representation of boundary conditions at outflow and inflow regions to obtain physiologically meaningful results. Therefore methods of reduced dimensional modelling are applied.
The simulations are carried out on unstructured meshes representing patient specific aortic geometries. Starting point for the modelling process is raw CT data provided by the "Klinikum rechts der Isar".