Convergence Analysis of Pressure Reconstruction Methods from Discrete Velocities

Magnetic resonance imaging allows the measurement of the three-dimensional velocity field in blood flows. Therefore, several methods have been proposed to reconstruct the pressure field from such measurements using the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations, thereby avoiding the use of invasive technologies. However, those measurements are obtained at limited spatial resolution given by the voxel sizes in the image. In this paper, we propose a strategy for the convergence analysis of state-of-the-art pressure reconstruction methods. The methods analyzed are the so-called Pressure Poisson Estimator (PPE) and Stokes Estimator (STE). In both methods, the right-hand side corresponds to the terms that involving the field velocity in the Navier–Stokes equations, with a piecewise linear interpolation of the exact velocity. In the theoretical error analysis, we show that many terms of different order of convergence appear. These are certainly dominated by the lowest-order term, which in most cases stems from the interpolation of the velocity field. However, the numerical results in academic examples indicate that only the PPE may profit of increasing the polynomial order, and that the STE presents a higher accuracy than the PPE, but the interpolation order of the velocity field always prevails. Furthermore, we compare the pressure estimation methods on real MRI data, assessing the impact of different spatial resolutions and polynomial degrees on each method. Here, the results are consistent with the academic test cases in terms of sensitivity to polynomial order as well as the STE showing to be potentially more accurate when compared to reference pressure measurements.