Skip to main content
. 2018 Jun 26;9:742. doi: 10.3389/fphys.2018.00742

Table 3.

Current challenges and opportunities in numerical simulation of intra-cardiac flow.

Simulation procedures Current challenges and opportunities
Image acquisition •Current spatial and time resolution for cardiac MRI was around 1–1.5 mm/40–50 ms respectively (Saeed et al., 2015), which are inadequate for assessing the rapid opening and closing of thin heart valves.
Segmentation and 3D model reconstruction •Segmentation and 3D model reconstruction of the valves and right ventricle is challenging due to the limited spatial resolution of current MRI technology.
Fluid dynamics simulation Fluid mesh generation •To factor in wall motion during numerical simulation with dynamic meshes, the number of surface meshes and their connectivity must match at various time frames. Cubic-spline interpolation is usually needed to achieve adequate number of meshes for transient numerical simulation. This might be challenging for a complex heart chamber with valves, especially for the patients with heart disease.
•Cartesian meshes can be used when the blood flow is simulated using the immersed boundary method (Peskin, 2003).
Boundary conditions •Realistic pressure and flow information could be provided through phase-contrast MRI, cardiac catheterization and etc.
Fluid solver •Improvement of computational speed to solve complex flow phenomena for heart chamber and valves are essential for the multi-physics coupling.
Multi-physics coupling and others •Besides FSI, coupling electrophysiology with mechanics is also important in understanding heart function (Quarteroni et al., 2017)
The definitions of fiber orientation (Crozier et al., 2016) and tissue properties (Golob et al., 2014) are important for modeling the cardiac multiscale interaction.