Perfusion model

[menon-karthik]

I am developing a model for the perfusion of blood within a tissue volume. The model is a single-compartment Darcy model, which can be converted into a Helmholtz equation.

Details of the model in this paper: Papamanolis, L., et al. (2021). Myocardial Perfusion Simulation for Coronary Artery Disease: A Coupled Patient-Specific Multiscale Model. Annals of Biomedical Engineering, 49(5), 1432–1447. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-020-02681-z

Details of implementation:

• The solver for the Helmholtz equation is being developed as a modification to the HEATS diffusion solver.
• The tissue volume is divided into perfusion regions, each with a perfusion pressure. Other important parameters are permeability and conductance parameters.
• The nodes corresponding to each perfusion region, and the corresponding perfusion pressure, depend on the vascular network that is perfusing the tissue volume. So this is user-specific, but the interface with svFSI is a list of nodes that specify each territory.
• This is generally solved as a steady problem, which can easily be accomplished by setting density = 0.

The idea is to couple this with a flow simulation so that the flow pressures drive the perfusion in the tissue volume. The aim is to couple it with 3D and 0D flow solvers. Currently, the interface between the perfusion model and the flow solver will be a "hand-off" using file I/O (subject to improvement if required).

[vvedula22]

@menon-karthik can you share any update on this? We are interested in using and testing this utility.