Zurich: Efficient method for obtaining blood flow measurements

Licensing opportunity

Obtaining high quality flow field estimations with secondary flow quantities such as wall shear stress and oscillatory shear index can be very useful in medical diagnostics.

However, measuring accurate blood flow information with suitable resolution is a very challenging task. Most flow measurement techniques can only resolve sparse information and then have to rely on flow simulations to provide high resolution data. This involves a huge computational effort which is very time consuming and only a limited amount of measured information can be integrated in the final result.

Scientists at ETH Zurich have developed a new method that uses a database of pre-computed blood flow data, from which an interpolation is made based on a partial measurement, thus resulting in a high quality flow field.

All the simulation work is done beforehand so as to accumulate knowledge of the blood flow patterns typically occurring in a given vascular location, which is then used to perform an intelligent interpolation based on the measurement data.

This approach simultaneously overcomes both the major drawbacks of flow simulation techniques: as no numerical problems are solved at run time, the flow field can be recovered in a very short time and a maximal amount of measurement information can be used to constrain the reconstruction

Key benefits include:

• Highly detailed blood flow field estimation can be recovered in a couple of minutes

• Can be used with MRI, CT or ultrasound imaging

• Scalable complexity at no added cost

• Increased measurement fidelity

• No computational flow simulations required at run time

The technology can be used to provide:

• Patient-specific flow imaging for blood or cerebrospinal fluid in estimating aneurysm rupture risk, predicting risk of atherosclerotic plaque deposition and rupture and predicting medication delivery

• Fast flow field prediction for internal flows

• Experimental fluid dynamics:

• wind tunnel measurements

• visualizing flow in reactors

A patent is pending.