title: Liver cancer arterial perfusion modelling and CFD boundary conditions methodology: a case study of the haemodynamics of a patient-specific hepatic artery in literature-based healthy and tumour-bearing liver scenarios.
abstract: Some of the latest treatments for unresectable liver malignancies (primary or metastatic tumours), which include bland embolisation, chemoembolisation, and radioembolisation, among others, take advantage of the increased arterial blood supply to the tumours to locally attack them. A better understanding of the factors that influence this transport may help improve the therapeutic procedures by taking advantage of flow patterns or by designing catheters and infusion systems that result in the injected beads having increased access to the tumour vasculature. Computational analyses may help understand the haemodynamic patterns and embolic-microsphere transport through the hepatic arteries. In addition, physiological inflow and outflow boundary conditions are essential in order to reliably represent the blood flow through arteries. This study presents a liver cancer arterial perfusion model based on a literature review and derives boundary conditions for tumour-bearing liver-feeding hepatic arteries based on the arterial perfusion characteristics of normal and tumorous liver segment tissue masses and the hepatic artery branching configuration. Literature-based healthy and tumour-bearing realistic scenarios are created and haemodynamically analysed for the same patient-specific hepatic artery. As a result, this study provides boundary conditions for computational fluid dynamics simulations that will allow researchers to numerically study, for example, various intravascular devices used for liver disease intra-arterial treatments with different cancer scenarios. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
authors.affiliation: Thermal and Fluids Engineering Division, Mechanical Department, Tecnun-University of Navarra, Pº Manuel Lardizabal, 13, 20018, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain.
authors.forename: Jorge
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Aramburu
authors.affiliation: Thermal and Fluids Engineering Division, Mechanical Department, Tecnun-University of Navarra, Pº Manuel Lardizabal, 13, 20018, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain. ranton@tecnun.es.|Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria de Navarra (IdiSNA), Av. Pio XII, 36, 31008, Pamplona, Spain. ranton@tecnun.es.
authors.forename: Raúl
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Antón
authors.affiliation: Thermal and Fluids Engineering Division, Mechanical Department, Tecnun-University of Navarra, Pº Manuel Lardizabal, 13, 20018, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain.
authors.forename: Alejandro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Rivas
authors.affiliation: Thermal and Fluids Engineering Division, Mechanical Department, Tecnun-University of Navarra, Pº Manuel Lardizabal, 13, 20018, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain.
authors.forename: Juan Carlos
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Ramos
authors.affiliation: Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria de Navarra (IdiSNA), Av. Pio XII, 36, 31008, Pamplona, Spain.|Clínica Universidad de Navarra, Av. Pio XII, 36, 31008, Pamplona, Spain.|Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red de Enfermedades Hepáticas y Digestivas (CIBEREHD), Av. Pio XII, 36, 31008, Pamplona, Spain.
authors.forename: Bruno
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Sangro
authors.affiliation: Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria de Navarra (IdiSNA), Av. Pio XII, 36, 31008, Pamplona, Spain.|Clínica Universidad de Navarra, Av. Pio XII, 36, 31008, Pamplona, Spain.
authors.forename: José Ignacio
authors.initials: JI
authors.lastname: Bilbao
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D006439:Hemodynamics / Q000502:physiology*; D006499:Hepatic Artery / Q000502:physiology* / Q000503:physiopathology*; D006801:Humans; D008099:Liver / Q000098:blood supply / Q000502:physiology; D008113:Liver Neoplasms / Q000098:blood supply* / Q000503:physiopathology*; D008955:Models, Cardiovascular; D012039:Regional Blood Flow / Q000502:physiology
keywords: CFD; boundary conditions; cancer; haemodynamics; liver