More than half a million people in Europe suffer from such severe chronic kidney disease that their blood needs to be regularly purified by hemodialysis. The Achilles heel of hemodialysis is the vascular access used to connect the patient's blood circulation to the artificial kidney.

Current recommendation is to surgically create an arteriovenous fistula in the arm. However, dysfunction (too low or high blood flow) and complications (ischemic hand, heart failure) occur frequently.

The ARCH project is aimed at the development of model-based patient-specific computer models to simulate changes in blood flow distribution due to fistula creation. The modeling tools will be used for surgical planning and management of arteriovenous fistulas.