A New Method for Simulating Embolic Coils as Heterogeneous Porous Media

Purpose To gain insight into the influence of coils on aneurysmal hemodynamics, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) can be used. Conventional methods of modeling coils consider the explicit geometry of the deployed devices within the aneurysm and discretize the fluid domain. However, the complex geometry of a coil mass leads to cumbersome domain discretization along with a significant number of mesh elements. These problems have motivated a homogeneous porous medium coil model, whereby the explicit geometry of the coils is greatly simplified, and relevant homogeneous porous medium parameters are approximated. Unfortunately, since the coils are not distributed uniformly in the aneurysm, the homogeneity assumption is no longer valid.