Image, geometry and finite element mesh datasets for analysis of relationship between abdominal aortic aneurysm symptoms and stress in walls of abdominal aortic aneurysm

Abstract

These datasets contain Computed Tomography (CT) images of 19 patients with Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm (AAA) together with 19 patient-specific geometry data and computational grids (finite element meshes) created from these images applied in the research reported in Journal of Surgical Research article "Is There A Relationship Between Stress in Walls of Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm and Symptoms?"[1]. The images were randomly selected from the retrospective database of University Hospitals Leuven (Leuven, Belgium) and provided to The University of Western Australia's Intelligent Systems for Medicine Laboratory. The analysis was conducted using our freely-available open-source software BioPARR (Joldes et al., 2017) created at The University of Western Australia. The analysis steps include image segmentation to obtain the patient-specific AAA geometry, construction of computational grids (finite element meshes), and AAA stress computation. We use well-established and widely used data file formats (Nearly Raw Raster Data or NRRD for the images, Stereolitography or STL format for geometry, and Abaqus finite element code keyword format for the finite element meshes). This facilitates re-use of our datasets in practically unlimited range of studies that rely on medical image analysis and computational biomechanics to investigate and formulate indicators and predictors of AAA symptoms.

Keywords: Abdominal aortic aneurysm; Biomechanics; Finite element method; Patient-specific modelling; Symptoms.

Fig. 1

Structure of our dataset. We provide such dataset for each of the 19 patients (indicated as Case 1, Case 3, Case 4, Case 5, Case 7, Case 9, Case 10, Case 13, Case 14, Case 15, Case 17, Case 18, Case 19, Case 20, Case 21, Case 22, Case 23, Case 24, Case 25) analysed in Miller et al. . More detailed information is in section Data description above this figure.

Fig. 2

Boundary conditions for computing stress in AAA wall used in our datasets (files AAA.inp). The AAA superior and inferior surfaces are rigidly constrained.