Background: Stenosis of cerebral aqueduct (CA) is featured in many studies related to elevated intracranial cerebral pressures (ICP). It also presents a challenging situation to clinicians. Compressive forces play a lead role in pathological situations like tumor presence and hence can cause obstruction to the flow of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Due to this barrier, excessive retention of CSF in ventricles can occur. This in turn could contribute to increased pressure gradients inside the cranium. In literature, most of the numerical models are restricted to modeling the CSF flow by considering ventricle walls as rigid material unlike its behavior a deformable character. This paper, therefore, addresses the same from a holistic perspective by taking into consideration the dynamics of the flexible character of the ventricular wall. This adds to the novelty of this work by reconstructing an anatomically realistic ventricular wall behavior. To do this, the authors aim to develop a computational model of stenosis of CA due to brain tumor by invoking a fluid-structure interaction (FSI) method. The proposed 3D FSI model is simulated under two cases. First, simulation of pre-stenosis case with no interaction of tumor forces and secondly, a stenosis condition together-with dynamic interaction of tumor forces.
Results: Comparing the forces with and without tumor reveals a marked obstruction of CSF outflow post third ventricle and the cerebral aqueduct. Not only this but a drastic rise of CSF velocity from 21.2 mm/s in pre-stenosis case to 54.1 mm/s stenosis case is also observed along with a net deformation increase of 0.144 mm on walls of ventricle.
Conclusions: This is a significant contribution to brain simulation studies for pressure calculations, wherein the presence of tumors is a major concern.