Impact of inlet velocity waveform shape on hemodynamics

Monitoring disease development in arteries, which supply oxygen and nutrients to the body, is crucial and can be assessed using hemodynamic metrics. Hemodynamic metrics can be calculated via computational fluid dynamic simulation of patient-specific geometries. These simulations are known to be heavily influenced by boundary conditions, such as time-dependent inlet flow. However, the effects of inlet flow profiles have not previously been quantified or understood. Here we quantify the effects of modulating temporal arterial waveforms on hemodynamic metrics. Building on our previous work that identified the minimum number of points of interest needed to characterize a left coronary artery inlet waveform, here, we extend this approach to pulmonary and carotid artery waveforms, pinpointing critical points of interest on these waveforms. Using a systematic variation of these points, we quantify the effects on hemodynamic metrics such as wall shear stress, oscillatory shear index, and relative residence time. We simulate using 1D Navier–Stokes and 3D lattice Boltzmann simulation approaches conducted on high performance compute clusters. The results pinpoint parts of the waveform that are most susceptible to perturbations and measurement error. The impacts of this work include the construction of a method that can be applied to other fluid simulations with pulsatile inlet conditions and the ability to distinguish the vital parts of a pulsatile inlet condition for computational fluid dynamic simulations and clinical metrics. This work is an extension of work published at the International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS-2024), (Geddes et al., 2024).