Background

Congenital vascular disease is one of the leading causes of death in paediatric age. Despite the importance of paediatric haemodynamics, large investigations have been devoted to the evaluation of circulation in adults. The novelty of this study consists in the development of a well calibrated mathematical model of cardiovascular circulation in paediatric subjects. To reach the purpose, a model for adult circulation was modified and recalibrated with experimental data and literature from children to be able to calculate the flow rates and pressures in the brain and neck.

Methods

The haemodynamic model simulates the 76 main arteries, together with the main veins in brain and neck. A proper magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) dataset of 29 volunteers aged 12 ± 5 years (mean ± standard deviation) was used to extract age-dependent physiological and clinical parameters such as heart rate, flow rate, vessel cross section area, and blood pressure. The computational model was calibrated using such experimental data. The paediatric and adult model results were compared.

Results

Increase of the vessels stiffness due to aging contributes to a flow rate decrease while blood pressure increases. In accordance, our simulation results show about 16% decrease in mean pressure of internal jugular vein in paediatric rather than adult subjects. The model outcomes indicated about 88% correlation with MRI data.

Conclusions

The mathematical model simulates the paediatric head and neck blood circulation. The model provides detailed information of human haemodynamics including arterial and venous network to study both paediatric and adult blood circulation.

中文翻译：

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小儿血流动力学建模：使用定量流MRI进行开发和实验验证。

背景

先天性血管疾病是小儿死亡的主要原因之一。尽管小儿血流动力学很重要，但大量的研究致力于评估成人的血液循环。这项研究的新颖性在于开发了一个校准良好的小儿心血管循环数学模型。为了达到这个目的，对成人循环模型进行了修改，并用来自儿童的实验数据和文献进行了重新校准，以便能够计算出大脑和颈部的流速和压力。

方法

血液动力学模型模拟了76条主要动脉以及大脑和颈部的主要静脉。使用29位12±5岁（均值±标准差）志愿者的适当磁共振成像（MRI）数据集来提取年龄相关的生理和临床参数，例如心率，流速，血管横截面积和血压。使用这种实验数据校准计算模型。比较了儿科和成人模型的结果。

结果

由于老化引起的血管刚度的增加导致流速降低而血压升高。相应地，我们的模拟结果显示，小儿科而非成年科目的颈内静脉平均压力降低了约16％。模型结果表明与MRI数据的相关性约为88％。

结论

数学模型模拟了小儿头颈部的血液循环。该模型提供了人类血液动力学的详细信息，包括动脉和静脉网络，以研究儿科和成人的血液循环。