Porosity distribution upon the surface of a deployed flow diverter: an experimental and simulation study

Flow diverters are widely extended in clinical practice for intracraneal aneurysms treatment. They are formed by a dense mesh of braided wires that partially occludes the aneurysm neck and restores the blood flow into the parent vessel. The occlusion degree is highly dependant on the distribution of the wires under the aneurysm, which is affected by the vessel geometry. Nowadays, there are no clinical indicators of the covering ratio once the flow diverter is deployed. We propose a novel method for the simulation of the flow diverter local porosity before its deployment into the parent vessel. We validate the method on curved silicon models, obtaining a correlation of 0.9 between the simulated values and the measured porosity on the deployed flow diverter.