BASELINE COMPUTATIONAL MODELING OF HEALTHY LUNG TRIPLE BIFURCATION GEOMETRY FOR ACUTE RESPIRATORY DISTRESS SYNDROME (ARDS, COVID RESEARCH)

Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) leads to acute respiratory failure caused by injury to the lungs and is observed to cause high mortality among critical care patients. Most common practice to aid patients with lung injury is to provide mechanical ventilation, which may add to ARDS severity due to incorrect regulation of the flow input and is termed as ventilator induced lung injury (VILI). To enumerate the mechanisms leading to VILI, a computational model is developed and implemented to explore flow rates and pressure distribution in a human tracheobronchial airway model from third to sixth generation branches. Pressure drop values in each zone in the bifurcating network are derived from flow parameter values obtained from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations conducted for five different flows corresponding to Reynolds number (Re) varying from 100 to 2000. The aim of this study is to improve the cognition of the dynamics and mechanics of flow in lung airways for the purpose of optimizing mechanical ventilation parameters, while focusing on pulmonary vasculature, to ultimately develop a Lung Physiome. The proposed methodology is designed for simplifying numerical and computational procedures to predict complex flow fields inside lung airways. This study successfully demonstrated a computational model to observe flow velocity and pressure patterns in the various segments of the lung airways and identified the sensitive areas in the triple bifurcation geometry. This work is preliminary to developing a digital twin for individualized therapeutics of patients with lung diseases like COVID.