Impact of injection velocity on catheter-based drug delivery in bifurcating vessels: In silico and in vitro analysis

Many biomedical applications involve the transport of fluid and/or particles in bifurcating vessels, such as aerosol transport in the lungs and transarterial radioembolization (TARE). Inspired by TARE, we study the injection of fluid via a catheter in an idealized liver vasculature through experiments and lattice Boltzmann simulations. First, we validate the simulations using in vitro experiments of dye injected through a catheter. Then, we investigate the impact of catheter injection velocity on the distribution of injected fluid. The sensitivity of the distributions to changes in flow rate is low at catheter flow rates Qc≤6mLmin−1 and Qc≥11mLmin−1, while in the intermediate regime, changes in flow rate of only 2 ml/min lead to changes in distribution of more than 50%. This is shown to originate from changes in the flow field in the first bifurcation. Specifically, the sensitivity to flow rate becomes large as the jet breakdown length approaches the distance to the first bifurcation. Our work represents a first step toward a fundamental understanding of the effect of injection velocity in TARE and similar applications.