Towards Real-time Adaptive Anisotropic Image-to-mesh Conversion for Vascular Flow Simulations

Abstract: Presented is a path towards a fast and robust adaptive anisotropic mesh generation method that is designed to help streamline the discretization of complex vascular geometries within the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling process. The proposed method combines multiple software tools into a single pipeline to provide the following: (1) image-to-mesh conversion which satisfies quality, fidelity, and smoothness requirements, (2) the generation of a boundary layer grid over the high fidelity surface, (3) a parallel adaptive anisotropic meshing procedure which satisfies real-time requirements, and (4) robustness, which is satisfied by the pipeline's ability to process segmented images and CAD models. The proposed approach is tested with two brain aneurysm cases and is shown to satisfy all the aforementioned requirements. The next steps are to fully parallelize the remaining components of the pipeline to maximize potential performance and to test its integration within a CFD vascular flow simulation. Just as the parallel anisotropic adaptation procedure was tested within aerospace CFD simulations using CAD models, the method is expected to provide accurate results for CFD vascular flow simulations in real-time when executed on multicore cc-NUMA architectures.