Automated Hexahedral Mesh Generation in a Complex Vascular Tree: The Extended Treemesh Method

Numerical analysis of the cardiovascular system can provide medical researchers with information that cannot (easily) be measured in a clinical setting and may contribute to a better comprehension and insight into the pathophysiology of cardiovascular diseases. In addition, numerical models offer a computational environment in which both new and existing medical procedures and devices can be tested and optimized, which is both cost effective and patient friendly. The continuous improvement of computational methods, computational power and medical imaging techniques strengthens the general belief that computational models will eventually find their way into clinical practice, what can be seen in todays trend toward more realistic patient-specific models. This new trend brings along more complex geometries and larger computational domains for which the quality of the corresponding meshes can become a bottle neck for the image-based analysis, both in computation time as in accuracy of the solution. Therefore, the Treemesh method has been developed by De Santis et al. [1], an algorithm to generate high-quality hexahedral meshes in a multi-block structured way. However, when the geometry becomes too complicated, a high-quality Treemesh for the fluid domain can become hard to generate. In this work, the extended Treemesh (XTreemesh) method has been developed, an algorithm to auto-generate a high-quality unstructured hexahedral mesh for both the fluid domain and the structural domain of complex image-based vascular tree geometries.