Upcoming Event: Oden Institute Seminar

Cardiac Fluid-Structure Interaction Models for Simulating Structural Heart Interventions

Boyce Griffith, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Abstract

This talk will presents a semi-automatic method for the construction of volumetric models of the aortic valve using computed tomography angiography images. Although the aortic valve typically cannot be segmented directly from a computed tomography angiography image, the method described herein uses manually selected samples of an aortic segmentation derived from this image to inform the construction. These samples capture certain physiologic landmarks andare used to construct a volumetric valve model. As ademonstration of the capabilities of this method, valve modelsfor 25 pediatric patients are created. A selected valve anatomyis used to perform fluid–structure interaction simulations usingthe immersed finite element/difference method with physio-logic driving and loading conditions. Simulation results demonstrate this method creates a functional valve that opensand closes normally and generates pressure and flow wave-forms that are similar to those observed clinically.

Biography

The Cardiovascular Modeling and Simulation Laboratory (Boyce Griffith, PI) is a computational science research group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill affiliated with the Departments of Mathematics and Biomedical Engineering, the Carolina Center for Interdisciplinary Applied Mathematics, and the Computational Medicine Program and the McAllister Heart Institute at UNC School of Medicine.

We use methods of computational and applied mathematics, computer science, and bioengineering to develop physiological models of cardiac and cardiovascular function in health and disease. We participate in interdisciplinary collaborations encompassing clinical, experimental, and theoretical research, and involving applied mathematicians, computational scientists, engineers, biologists, and clinicians. Broad goals of the group are to develop leading methods for biomedical simulation, and to apply these methods to problems in medicine and biology, with the aim of advancing predictive simulation-based approaches to designing and optimizing cardiac and cardiovascular therapies and medical devices.

We also work to develop, to maintain, and to distribute general-purpose software tools for computer modeling and simulation that serve as key research infrastructure for a growing number of independent research projects, not limited to cardiovascular applications. The primary software product of the group is IBAMR, which is a distributed-memory parallel implementation of the immersed boundary (IB) method with support for Cartesian grid adaptive mesh refinement (AMR). Although IBAMR was initially developed to enable large-scale simulations of cardiac fluid-structure interaction (FSI), this software is now used to simulate diverse systems in fluid dynamics and FSI in various fields of science and engineering. IBAMR has also been used to develop infrastructure for modeling electrophysiological systems, and for simulating electro-mechanical interaction in cardiac and neuro-muscular systems.