Learning Patient-Specific Lumped Models for Interactive Coronary Blood Flow Simulations (Talk)

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is the single leading cause of death worldwide and Cardiac Computed Tomography Angiography (CCTA) is a non-invasive test to rule out CAD using the anatomical characterization of the coronary lesions. Recent studies suggest that coronary lesions’ hemodynamic significance can be assessed by Fractional Flow Reserve (FFR), which is usually measured invasively in the CathLab but can also be simulated from a patient-specific biophysical model based on CCTA data. We learn a parametric lumped model (LM) enabling fast computational fluid dynamic simulations of blood flow in elongated vessel networks to alleviate the computational burden of 3D finite element (FE) simulations. We adapt the coefficients balancing the local nonlinear hydraulic effects from a training set of precomputed FE simulations. Our LM yields accurate pressure predictions suggesting that costly FE simulations can be replaced by our fast LM paving the way to use a personalised interactive biophysical model with realtime feedback in clinical practice.