Computational Study of Intracardiac Flows
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A numerical framework to compute the blood flow within patient-specific human hearts was developed by Chnafa et al. . The geometry of the heart cavities and their wall dynamics were extracted from medical images, and the simulations were made using the in-house YALES2BIO solver in order to obtain a well-resolved description of the turbulent fluctuations within the intra-cardiac flow. With some improvements, this model will be used in order to validate a methodology named 4D-iVFM for data reconstruction from colour Doppler imaging. Namely, 4D-iVFM extends the single component velocity field measured by echocardiography into a 3-components field. The aim of this still on-going research effort is to develop an efficient and accurate tool which can be easily used by cardiologists to determine if a flow is abnormal or not, and thus allowing early diagnosis of some cardiac pathologies. In this context, variations of the heart models developed by Chnafa at al. are generated by varying some key features of these models in order to better understand their influence on the cardiac hemodynamics and challenge the 4D-iVFM algorithm in a variety of situations. In this framework, modifications of the heartbeat, diastole-systole ratio, volume of the heart, shape of the mitral valve and the addition of chordae tendineae will be considered. The blood flow modifications generated by these changes will be presented during this talk.