The Role of Shape and Heart Rate on the Performance of the Left Ventricle

Experimental investigation into the effect of compliance of a mock aorta on cardiac performance

Demand for heart transplants far exceeds supply of donated organs. This is attributed to the high percentage of donor hearts that are discarded and to the narrow six-hour time window currently available for transplantation. Ex-vivo heart perfusion (EVHP) provides the opportunity for resuscitation of damaged organs and extended transplantation time window by enabling functional assessment of the hearts in a near-physiologic state. Present work investigates the fluid mechanics of the ex-vivo flow loop and corresponding impact on cardiac performance. A mechanical flow loop is developed that is analogous to the region of the EVHP system that mimics in-vivo systemic circulation, including the body’s largest and most compliant artery, the aorta. This investigation is focused on determining the effect of mock aortic tubing compliance on pump performance. A custom-made silicone mock aorta was developed to simulate a range of in-vivo conditions and a physiological flow was generated using a commercial ventricular assist device (VAD). Monitored parameters, including pressure, tube distension and downstream velocity, acquired using time-resolved particle imaging velocimetry (PIV), were applied to an unsteady Bernoulli analysis of the flow in a novel way to evaluate pump performance as a proxy for cardiac workload. When compared to the rigid case, the compliant mock aorta case demonstrated healthier physiologic pressure waveforms, steadier downstream flow and reduced energetic demands on the pump. These results provide experimental verification of Windkessel theory and support the need for a compliant mock aorta in the EVHP system.

A hybrid echocardiography-CFD framework for ventricular flow simulations

Image-based CFD is a powerful tool to study cardiovascular flows while 2D echocardiography (echo) is the most widely used noninvasive imaging modality for the diagnosis of heart disease. Here, echo is combined with CFD, that is, an echo-CFD framework, to study ventricular flows. To achieve this, the previous 3D reconstruction from multiple 2D echo at standard cross sections is extended by: (a) reconstructing aortic and mitral valves from 2D echo and closing the left-ventricle (LV) geometry by approximating a superior wall; (b) incorporating the physiological assumption of the fixed apex as a reference (fixed) point in the 3D reconstruction; and (c) incorporating several smoothing algorithms to remove the nonphysical oscillations (ringing) near the basal section. The method is applied to echo from a baseline LV and one after inducing acute myocardial ischemia (AMI). The 3D reconstruction is validated by comparing it against a reference reconstruction from many echo sections while flow simulations are validated against the Doppler ultrasound velocity measurements. The sensitivity study shows that the choice of the smoothing algorithm does not change the flow pattern inside the LV. However, the presence of the mitral valve can significantly change the flow pattern during the diastole phase. In addition, the abnormal shape of a LV with AMI can drastically change the flow during diastole. Furthermore, the hemodynamic energy loss, as an indicator of the LV pumping performance, for different test cases is calculated, which shows a larger energy loss for a LV with AMI compared to the baseline one.

Numerical Simulations of Flow around Copepods: Challenges and Future Directions

Copepods are small aquatic creatures which are abundant in oceans as a major food source for fish, thereby playing a vital role in marine ecology. Because of their role in the food chain, copepods have been subject to intense research through different perspectives from anatomy, form-function biology, to ecology. Numerical simulations can uniquely support such investigations by quantifying: (i) the force and flow generated by different parts of the body, thereby clarify the form-function relation of each part; (ii) the relation between the small-scale flow around animal and the large-scale (e.g., oceanic) flow of its surroundings; and (iii) the flow and its energetics, thereby answering ecological questions, particularly, the three major survival tasks, i.e., feeding, predator avoidance, and mate-finding. Nevertheless, such numerical simulations need to overcome challenges involving complex anatomic shape of copepods, multiple moving appendages, resolving different scales (appendage-, animal- to large-scale). The numerical methods capable of handling such problems and some recent simulations are reviewed. At the end, future developments necessary to simulate copepods from animal- to surrounding-scale are discussed.

Effects of Reynolds and Womersley Numbers on the Hemodynamics of Intracranial Aneurysms

The effects of Reynolds and Womersley numbers on the hemodynamics of two simplified intracranial aneurysms (IAs), that is, sidewall and bifurcation IAs, and a patient-specific IA are investigated using computational fluid dynamics. For this purpose, we carried out three numerical experiments for each IA with various Reynolds (Re = 145.45 to 378.79) and Womersley (Wo = 7.4 to 9.96) numbers. Although the dominant flow feature, which is the vortex ring formation, is similar for all test cases here, the propagation of the vortex ring is controlled by both Re and Wo in both simplified IAs (bifurcation and sidewall) and the patient-specific IA. The location of the vortex ring in all tested IAs is shown to be proportional to Re/Wo² which is in agreement with empirical formulations for the location of a vortex ring in a tank. In sidewall IAs, the oscillatory shear index is shown to increase with Wo and 1/Re because the vortex reached the distal wall later in the cycle (higher resident time). However, this trend was not observed in the bifurcation IA because the stresses were dominated by particle trapping structures, which were absent at low Re = 151.51 in contrast to higher Re = 378.79.