Fluid Mechanics of Mechanical and Native Heart Valves
Background:
Prosthetic heart valves have been in use for overfour decades to replace diseased heart valves. However, present-day designs are far from ideal and significant complications such as blood clots, strokes, and heart attacks often arise after their implantation, requiring aggressive life long anti-coagulation therapy which in turn carries serious bleeding related side effects. It is well established that the root cause of these side effects is the exposure of blood elements to large mechanical forces induced by the complex, turbulent flow fields in the vicinity of these prostheses. Improving current prosthetic heart valve designs however needs highly accurate flow quantification - a task until recently not achievable due to the complex and intricate geometries of heart valve prostheses combined with the lack of appropriate computational methodologies. In this regard, we have successfully developed novel Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tools and conducted numerous experimental studies, thus yielding in-depth understanding of the complex physics of prosthetic heart valve flows under physiological conditions and at hemodynamically relevant scales. Below we briefly provide highlights of our latest research in prosthetic heart valves.
Methods:
To address the complexities of prosthetic heart valve flows at physiologic conditions,
1) we developed algorithms for simulating flows in arbitrarily complex domains with complex moving boundaries and implemented efficient iterative methods for solving the governing equations on fine computational meshes
2) we used highly resolved particle image velocimetry (PIV) and laser Doppler velocimetry (LDV) experiments to probe the flow physics and validation of the computational scheme.
Recent Results:
A major novelty of our work is the tight integration of numerical simulations and in vitro experiments. We have focused our work on the investigation of the flow in the vicinity of:
