Patient-specific hemodynamics prediction and virtual endovascular intervention using MediGRID and free software

Abstract

The fast growing resources available by Grid and cloud computing provide new opportunities for the daily work of scientific and business communities. Here we present a deployed system deriving detailed information on hemodynamics and vessel wall stresses from common tomography data in a simple and efficient way. The system is suited for direct use e.g. by radiologists or cardiologists in medical planning and clinical research settings. Up to now, detailed numerical simulations of similar kinds have required the effort of specialized, large, multi-disciplinary groups. The deployment of the new system is based on resources maintained by the nationally funded German MediGRID project. This assures broad accessibility, low or no set-up and maintenance costs and a high security level. The implementation design facilitates intuitive interactive usage for user-intensive parts and full exploitation of high-performance-computing for the computationally intensive components of the processing pipeline. Virtual vascular surgery is supported, including the placement of stents, clipping of aneurysms, and vessel dilation. The effect of such interventions can be explored, including parametric effects like stent position or porosity, as part of the intervention planning. Physical fields of interest like pressure, wall shear stress, blood flow volume rate, or their correlations can be inspected as time series or as interactive three-dimensional scenes. The grid related parts of the workflow are controlled readily over a web interface.