Predicting coronary artery occlusion risk from noninvasive images by combining CFD-FSI, cGAN and CNN.

ABSTRACT

Wall Shear Stress (WSS) is one of the most important parameters used in cardiovascular fluid mechanics, and it provides a lot of information like the risk level caused by any vascular occlusion. Since WSS cannot be measured directly and other available relevant methods have issues like low resolution, uncertainty and high cost, this study proposes a novel method by combining computational fluid dynamics (CFD), fluid-structure interaction (FSI), conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) and convolutional neural network (CNN) to predict coronary artery occlusion risk using only noninvasive images accurately and rapidly. First, a cGAN model called WSSGAN was developed to predict the WSS contours on the vessel wall by training and testing the model based on the calculated WSS contours using coupling CFD-FSI simulations. Then, an 11-layer CNN was used to classify the WSS contours into three grades of occlusions, i.e. low risk, medium risk and high risk. To verify the proposed method for predicting the coronary artery occlusion risk in a real case, the patient's Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images were converted into a 3D geometry for use in the WASSGAN model. Then, the predicted WSS contours by the WSSGAN were entered into the CNN model to classify the occlusion grade.