Sammendrag
Normal pressure hydrocephalus is a variant of reversible dementia. The symptoms manifest themselves in the form of urinary incontinence, gait disturbance and dementia, and it is estimated that at least 22 out of 100 000 people in Norway are afflicted with the disease. In this thesis, a biomechanical model of idiopathic normal pressure hydrocephalus (iNPH) is implemented. We treat the brain as a porous and continuous medium with seven interconnected and fluid filled porous compartments. Our model is based on the MPET framework of Tully and Ventikos (2011) and is implemented to simulate how the brain reacts to an infusion test. We generate patient specific meshes for 47 patients using MRI images taken by the group of Anders Eklund at Umeå University. In addition, we compute the average fluid pressure, average pore speed for each compartment, and the total inter-compartmental fluid transfer between all connected compartments. Two sets of simulations are performed, one investigating the effect of brain geometry alone, and another where experimental measurements are included to allow for patient specific boundary conditions. Brain geometry is found to have little effect on the overall results, with average compartmental pressure, fluid velocity and transfer rate being on average less than 10 % different between control and iNPH groups for most compartments. Enforcement of patient specific boundary conditions is, however, shown to be vital, as the variations in all quantities of interest are great both within and across groups when the personalised boundary conditions are applied.