Fluid-Dynamic Modeling of the Human Left Ventricle: Methodology and Application to Surgical Ventricular Reconstruction

Image-based large-eddy simulation in a realistic left heart

“…Two less intense blood recirculation zones can be detected: one at the apex, which is visible during the whole diastole and an intermittent one between the aortic valve and one of the MV leaflet. These blood recirculations are also described in-silico by Mihalef et al [39], Doenst et al [40] and Schenkel et al [38]. …”

“…Different research teams have developed IB-CFD methods for heart flows, more specifically to study the left ventricle alone [35,36,37,38]. Recently, more advanced work has been published, using a full heart model obtained from CT images [39] or a heart model fed from MR images [40]. The feasibility of cardiac IB-CFD has been shown, but the flow results notably suffered from limited spatial resolution or partial geometries (LV only in the majority of the cases).…”

Using Image-based CFD to Investigate the Intracardiac Turbulence

“…Two less intense blood recirculation zones can be detected: one at the apex, which is visible during the whole diastole and an intermittent one between the aortic valve and one of the MV leaflet. These blood recirculations are also described in silico [5,30,44]. Between the E wave and the A wave, the recirculating cell core in the LV moves from the ventricle center to the septum wall.…”

“…With the development of these cardiac imaging techniques, patient-specific geometries have been progressively used in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) [5,21,28,30,42,44]. Realistic heart wall movements on the basis of cine MRI or Computed Tomography (CT) scan data can be used: heart movement is prescribed from the patient-specific medical images, which can be acquired using standard clinical imaging procedures, instead of being computed.…”

Left Ventricular Fluid Mechanics: The Long Way from Theoretical Models to Clinical Applications

“…Developments along this line, where CMR and Echocardiographic data are used to reconstruct the human (four chambers) heart, reported a study in a subject with antero-apical myocoardial infarction before and after surgical ventricular remodeling, in comparison with a healthy volunteer. 19 The heart was coupled with a model of the circulatory system, in order to gain information about the pressure field, and the valves were modelled as 2D planar orifices, on the basis of Echocardiographic recordings. 70 More recently, the three-dimensional arrangement of the early diastolic flow was investigated simulating the heart wall motion with a cell-based activation method, using an unstructured description of the endocardial wall immersed in a stationary curvilinear grid.…”