Frontier Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences
Tohoku University

Cerebral aneurysm is a vascular disease characterized by the local and abnormal expansion of cerebrovascular wall. The rupture of cerebral aneurysms results in subarachnoid hemorrhage, well known for its high mortality (more than 10,000 deaths each year in Japan). Thus, it has been of medical importance to investigate how cerebral aneurysms initiate and rupture.

Although the mechanisms are still unclear, previous studies have suggested that ‘local mechanical forces/stimuli induced by blood flow’ could play an important role in the initiation of cerebral aneurysms. Our study focuses on the possible association between temporal/spatial fluctuations of the local mechanical forces/stimuli induced by blood flow and the initiation of cerebral aneurysms. The combined technique of medical image processing and computational fluid dynamics enables us to evaluate numerically such fluctuation phenomena in detail. The former is used to mimic subject-specific vascular geometries based on their CT/MRI images; the later is a technique that can be applied for simulating the blood flow numerically based on the equations of fluid dynamics. The combination of these techniques provides a framework for us to reproduce a ‘subject-specific blood flow dynamics’. We are conducting an interdisciplinary collaborative research intended to identify hemodynamic risk factors for cerebral aneurysms on the basis of the combined technique and a strong association with a medical researcher/institution.