Synthetic Dataset Generation, Physical Consistency and Active Learning for Shape-Informed Surrogate Modeling of Hemodynamics

Abstract

Model order reduction has the potential to enable real-time patient-specific assessment of cardiovascular flows. However, it still faces significant challenges stemming from the geometric variability of vascular anatomies. Building upon the SynthAorta dataset (Bosnjak et al., IEEE Trans. Med. Imag. 45(1), 2026) of physiological aortic geometries, we generate an extensive dataset of physiologically consistent computational fluid dynamics solutions through an automatic boundary-condition adjustment procedure. A common reference geometry allows all patient-specific anatomies to be represented by displacement fields, providing point-to-point correspondence without the need for geometric registration. Based on this dataset, we develop Graph U-Net and Transformer U-Net surrogate models to predict velocity and pressure fields at peak systole. We further investigate two strategies to enhance data efficiency and prediction accuracy: active learning and differentiable physical consistency constraints based on the finite element residual. The results show that active learning is strongly regime-dependent: while it offers little benefit over random sampling during early training, it improves performance during fine-tuning through gradient- and subspace-based acquisition strategies. Similarly, physical consistency constraints prove to be substantially more effective as a fine-tuning objective than as a regularizer applied throughout training. Finally, out-of-distribution studies demonstrate that the primary limitation of surrogate models lies in the geometric support of the underlying parametrization rather than in the neural network architectures themselves. The proposed framework combines synthetic dataset generation, geometry-aware surrogate modeling, physics-informed optimization, and active learning into a scalable workflow for inter-patient hemodynamic prediction.