Fast simulations of patient-specific haemodynamics of coronary artery bypass grafts based on a POD-Galerkin method and a vascular shape parametrization

In this work a reduced-order computational framework for the study of haemodynamics in three-dimensional patient-specific configurations of coronary artery bypass grafts dealing with a wide range of scenarios is proposed. We combine several efficient algorithms to face at the same time both the geometrical complexity involved in the description of the vascular network and the huge computational cost entailed by time dependent patient-specific flow simulations. Medical imaging procedures allow to reconstruct patient-specific configurations from clinical data. A centerlines-based parametrization is proposed to efficiently handle geometrical variations. POD-Galerkin reduced-order models are employed to cut down large computational costs. This computational framework allows to characterize blood flows for different physical and geometrical variations relevant in the clinical practice, such as stenosis factors and anastomosis variations, in a rapid and reliable way. Several numerical results are discussed, highlighting the computational performance of the proposed framework, as well as its capability to carry out sensitivity analysis studies, so far out of reach. In particular, a reduced-order simulation takes only a few minutes to run, resulting in computational savings of 99% of CPU time with respect to the full-order discretization. Moreover, the error between full-order and reduced-order solutions is also studied, and it is numerically found to be less than 1% for reduced-order solutions obtained with just O(100) online degrees of freedom. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.