Flow Diversion for Brain Aneurysms

Flow diverters, which are essentially fine-mesh stents, are routinely used to treat patients with certain types of aneurysms. There are multiple devices in the market which vary in their design of composition and braid structure, all with the mutual goal of reducing intraneurysmal flow. Angiographic and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) studies can be used to evaluate the effects of different pore structures of the devices on intraneurysmal flow. We can ‘treat’ patient-specific silicone replicas of aneurysms with various devices, acquire X-ray angiography images in the Zeego lab, and analyze the images to compare the effect of each device on intra-aneurysmal flow. The silicone models can then be scanned after device deployment to conduct CFD studies. Velocity fields generated by CFD can be used to measure the intra-aneurysmal kinetic energy of blood flow to quantify and compare the flow diversion efficacy of the devices.