Hemodynamics within the whole human heart

Creating a virtual model of the whole heart is a formidable computational task since it needs to account for the complex deforming biological tissues, which are anisotropic and nonlinear, along with the pulsatile, transitional and turbulent character of the flow, the strong fluid/structure interaction and their connection with the electrophysiological system.

     For the first time we have applied our fluid-structure-electrophysiology interaction (FSEI) code to solve the hemodynamics within the whole human heart accounting for the four chambers connected with the thoracic aorta, the pulmonary veins/artery, the vena cava superiore/inferiore and the four cardiac valves. The cardiac hemodynamics is given by the direct solution of the Navier-Stokes equations three-way coupled with a structural and an electrophysiology solver accounting for the orientation of the muscular fibers of the myocardium and for the heterogeneity of the cardiac electrophysiology system including the fast conduction networks of bundles and Purkinje. Remarkably, the use of the immersed boundary method and of the GPU-acceleration of the code allows to integrate a complete heart beat in few hours, thus providing a fast and predictive tool for virtually testing new prosthetic devices and surgical procedures.