Speaker

Chris Roberts, Wayne State University

Abstract

Hydrocephalus is characterized by the accumulation of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) in the ventricles of the brain. Treating this neurological disorder involves the implantation of a silicone ventricular catheter (VC) into the ventricles to drain the fluid into the plural, atrial, or peritoneal cavity. However, the ventricular catheter (VC) failure rate is 50% within two years due to mechanical obstructions of the drainage holes caused by tissue obstruction and cellular adhesion in hydrocephalic ventricles. Incremental progress has been made with VC design apart from antibiotic impregnation to prevent bacterial cell accumulation, but the failure rate continues to remain unacceptably high. Prior work using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has used a makeshift rectangular box to replicate a hydrocephalic ventricle. Given the dynamic nature of ventricular morphology, a box lacks the complexity necessary to accurately depict the intricate relationship between CSF flow in the ventricles and through the ventricular catheter under unstable physiological flow conditions. By employing ANSYS Fluent computational fluid dynamics, we conducted a comprehensive analysis to explore how cerebrospinal fluid flow is influenced by patient-specific morphological changes in hydrocephalic ventricles under pathophysiological disease conditions such as hydrocephalus.