Computer modeling and simulation of heart valve function and intervention

Abstract Computational modeling and simulation play an essential role in the design of medical devices, such as bioprosthetic heart valves. It also complements experiments to quantify heart valve dynamics under healthy and diseased conditions. Finite element and fluid–structure interaction (FSI) analyses have been widely used because they can provide detailed data on valve kinematics, stress distributions, and flow patterns that are not readily available in experiments. In this chapter, we first review the fundamental formulation of computational models, including governing equations, geometrical modeling, and constitutive models of heart valve tissues. Then we describe applications of structural and FSI modeling to native and bioprosthetic heart valves in details. Bottlenecks of current technologies in patient-specific modeling from clinical image data are also detailed.