Modelling of bloodflow through surgically joined arteries
Micro-arterial Anastomoses are necessary to facilitate blood supply to transplanted tissue in applications such as breast reconstruction and reconstructive surgery following trauma.
Our work, in collaboration with Surg. Cdr. Rory Rickard (Consultant Plastic Surgeon) is focused on developing a CFD based means of reliably predicting flow behaviour in specific anastomoses geometries, with the aim of informing decisions as to the most appropriate anastomosis technique for a given application. The method under development uses micro-CT scans of arterial geometry as the input to numerical simulations that aim to find the optimum balance between simulation time, computational resource requirement and simulation reliability.