Abstract
The gold-standard for pulmonary hypertension (PH) diagnosis is invasive right-heart catheterisation, a technique ill-suited for general patient screening. Noninvasive markers of PH are thus of direct clinical value. Using 4D Flow Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), a recent empirical correlation has been observed between the duration of a blood vortex in the main pulmonary artery (MPA), and the mean pulmonary arterial pressure. The mechanism underlying this relationship, however, remains unknown. In this context, our aim was to replicate this correlation using computational fluid dynamics simulations. Retrospective MRI data from six subjects with suspected PH were used to generate patient-specific models of the pulmonary arteries. Vortex durations in the MPA were derived from the simulations using four methods: visual assessment, Q-criterion, Lambda2 criterion, and backward flow. Results were compared to reference durations predicted by the empirical correlation. The method most closely reproducing values from the relationship was the backward-flow approach (overall error of 7%, vs. 12–14% for the other methods). In-silico simulations are a valid approach to unveil the mechanistic factors driving pulmonary vortex behaviour in future larger modelling cohorts.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Daniel Giese at Siemens Healthcare GmbH, Erlangen, Germany, for providing the 4D flow work-in-progress package. Malak Sabry is supported by a PhD educational grant from Siemens Healthineers and the Magdi Yacoub Foundation.
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Sabry, M. et al. (2023). Vortex Duration Time to Infer Pulmonary Hypertension: In-Silico Emulation and Dependence on Quantification Technique. In: Bernard, O., Clarysse, P., Duchateau, N., Ohayon, J., Viallon, M. (eds) Functional Imaging and Modeling of the Heart. FIMH 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13958. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35302-4_44
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35302-4_44
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