MEAM Seminar: “Computational FSI Modeling of the Cardiovascular System”

Computational modeling and simulation has become a routine part of cardiovascular clinical research. These techniques leverage medical imaging to construct patient-specific models that can be used to study disease processes, design and evaluate medical devices, perform predictive surgery, and aid in clinical decision-making. Modern cardiovascular simulations often require millions of elements and tens of thousands of time steps. Thus, there is a need for accurate, robust, and efficient computational techniques to simulate complex pulsatile hemodynamics potentially coupled with deformable vessel walls or heart valves. In this talk, I will discuss computational methods for simulating blood flow and for modeling fluid-structure interaction problems in the cardiovascular system. I will present improvements to existing finite element solver technologies, including development of a block preconditioning technique for fully implicit time integration schemes coupled to reduced dimension models of the cardiovascular system (e.g. Windkessel model). Mass conservation properties of various techniques will be investigated in a patient-specific aorta model. Next, I will show how these improved techniques can be leveraged to simulate fluid-structure interaction problems using the arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian method combined with a quasi-Newton solution procedure. Lastly, I will present an immersed approach to computational modeling of fluid-structure interaction problems and demonstrate the potential of the method to simulate heart valves dynamics over the cardiac cycle using an idealized problem.