Prediction of Cerebral Aneurysm Hemodynamics With Porous-Medium Models of Flow-Diverting Stents via Deep Learning

The interventional treatment of cerebral aneurysm requires hemodynamics to provide proper guidance. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is gradually used in calculating cerebral aneurysm hemodynamics before and after flow-diverting (FD) stent placement. However, the complex operation (such as the construction and placement simulation of fully resolved or porous-medium FD stent) and high computational cost of CFD hinder its application. To solve these problems, we applied aneurysm hemodynamics point cloud data sets and a deep learning network with double input and sampling channels. The flexible point cloud format can represent the geometry and flow distribution of different aneurysms before and after FD stent (represented by porous medium layer) placement with high resolution. The proposed network can directly analyze the relationship between aneurysm geometry and internal hemodynamics, to further realize the flow field prediction and avoid the complex operation of CFD. Statistical analysis shows that the prediction results of hemodynamics by our deep learning method are consistent with the CFD method (error function <13%), but the calculation time is significantly reduced 1,800 times. This study develops a novel deep learning method that can accurately predict the hemodynamics of different cerebral aneurysms before and after FD stent placement with low computational cost and simple operation processes.