Efficient Parallel Simulation of Blood Flows in Abdominal Aorta

Abstract

It is known that the maximum diameter for the rupture-risk assessment of the abdominal aortic aneurysm is a generally good method, but not sufficient. Alternative features obtained with computational modeling may provide additional useful criteria. Though computational approaches are noninvasive, they are often time-consuming because of the high computational complexity. In this paper, we present a highly parallel algorithm for the numerical simulation of unsteady blood flows in the patient-specific abdominal aorta. We model the blood flow with the unsteady incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, and solve the discretized system with a highly scalable domain decomposition method. With this approach, the complete flow field can be obtained in less than an hour, instead of days with older methods. We show experimentally that the proposed method offers accurate solutions of the pressure, the velocity and the wall shear stress, and the parallel efficiency is higher than 70% on a parallel computer with more than 1,000 processor cores.