Evolutionary Pathlines for Blood Flow Exploration in Cerebral Aneurysms

Abstract

Blood flow simulations play an important role for the understanding of vascular diseases, such as aneurysms. However, analysis of the resulting flow patterns, especially comparisons across patient groups, are challenging. Typically, the hemodynamic analysis relies on trial and error inspection of the flow data based on pathline visualizations and surface renderings. Visualizing too many pathlines at once may obstruct interesting features, e.g., embedded vortices, whereas with too little pathlines, particularities such as flow characteristics in aneurysm blebs might be missed. While filtering and clustering techniques support this task, they require the pre-computation of pathlines densely sampled in the space-time domain. Not only does this become prohibitively expensive for large patient groups, but the results often suffer from undersampling artifacts. In this work, 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. Integrated in an interactive framework, it efficiently supports the evaluation of hemodynamics for clinical research and treatment planning in case of cerebral aneurysms. The specification of general optimization criteria for entire patient groups allows the blood flow data to be batch-processed. We present clinical cases to demonstrate the benefits of our approach especially in presence of aneurysm blebs. Furthermore, we conducted an evaluation with four expert neuroradiologists. As a result, we report advantages of our method for treatment planning to underpin its clinical potential.