Post-processing techniques of 4D flow MRI: velocity and wall shear stress

Abstract: As the original velocity field obtained from four-dimensional (4D) flow magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contains considerable amount of noises and errors, the available Divergence-free smoothing (DFS) method can be used to process the 4D flow MRI data for reducing noises, eliminating errors, fixing missing data and eventually providing the smoothed flow field. However, the traditional DFS does not have the ability to deal with the flow in the near wall region of vessel, especially for satisfying the no-slip boundary condition. In this study, therefore, an improved DFS method with specific near wall treatment is introduced for processing with 4D flow MRI inner flow with curved wall boundary as the blood flows. On the other hand, due to the coarse resolution of 4D flow MRI, velocity gradients in the near wall region are normally underestimated. As a result, a special wall function is required for accurately computing wall shear stress (WSS).