Visual Exploration of Intracranial Aneurysm Blood Flow Adapted to the Clinical Researcher

Abstract

Rupture risk assessment is a key to devise patient-specific treatment plans of cerebral aneurysms. To understand and predict the development of aneurysms and other vascular diseases over time, both hemodynamic flow patterns and their effect on the vessel surface need to be analyzed. Flow structures close to the vessel wall often correlate directly with local changes in surface parameters, such as pressure or wall shear stress. However, especially for the identification of specific blood flow characteristics that cause local startling parameters on the vessel surface, like elevated pressure values, an interactive analysis tool is missing. In order to find meaningful structures in the entirety of the flow, the data has to be filtered based on the respective explorative aim. Thus, we present a combination of visualization, filtering and interaction techniques for explorative analysis of blood flow with a focus on the relation of local surface parameters and underlying flow structures. In combination with a filtering-based approach, we propose the usage of evolutionary algorithms to reduce the overhead of computing pathlines that do not contribute to the analysis, while simultaneously reducing the undersampling artifacts. We present clinical cases to demonstrate the benefits of both our filter-based and evolutionary approach and showcase its potential for patient-specific treatment plans.