Calibration of patient-specific computational models of cerebral blood flow in cerebrovascular disease using arterial spin labeling

Collateral flow patterns in the circle of Willis play a major role in maintaining adequate blood supply to the brain in the presence of cerebrovascular occlusive disease. In this work, we present a strategy to quantify collateral flow by calibrating patient-specific computational fluid dynamic models of cerebral blood flow with perfusion data from arterial spin labeling. For a patient with right carotid stenosis, the collateral flow patterns in the circle of Willis obtained with the calibrated computational model show good agreement with territorial perfusion maps acquired with vessel-selective arterial spin labeling.