Near real-time adaptive isotropic and anisotropic image-to-mesh conversion for cerebral aneurysm simulations

This paper presents two performance optimization techniques for a mesh adaptation method that is designed to help streamline the discretization of complex vascular geometries within the numerical modeling process. This method is integrated into a pipeline with an image-to-mesh conversion tool to generate adaptive anisotropic meshes from segmented medical images. The pipeline is shown to satisfy quality, fidelity, smoothness, and robustness requirements while providing near real-time performance for medical image-to-mesh conversion. Tested with two brain aneurysm cases and utilizing up to 96 CPU cores within a single, multicore node on Purdue University’s Anvil supercomputer, the parallel adaptive anisotropic meshing method utilizes a hierarchical load balancing model (designed for large, cc-NUMA shared memory architectures) and contains an optimized local reconnection operation that performs three times faster than its original implementation from previous studies. While utilizing a new user-defined sizing function, we also show an adaptive isotropic method that generates meshes with good quality and fidelity of up to approximately 50 million elements in less than a minute while the adaptive anisotropic method is shown to generate approximately the same number of elements in about 5 min.