From non-invasive hemodynamic measurements towards patient-specific cardiovascular diagnosis

The past two decades have seen impressive success in medical technology, generating novel experimental data at an unexpected rate. However, current computational methods cannot sufficiently manage the data analysis for interpretation, so clinical application is hindered, and the benefit for the patient is still small. Even though numerous physiological models have been developed to describe complex dynamical mechanisms, their clinical application is limited, because parameterization is crucial, and most problems are ill-posed and do not have unique solutions. However, this information deficit is imminent to physiological data, because the measurement process always contains contamination like artifacts or noise and is limited by a finite measurement precision. The lack of information in hemodynamic data measured at the outlet of the left ventricle, for example, induces an infinite number of solutions to the hemodynamic inverse problem (possible vascular morphologies that can represent the hemodynamic conditions) (Quick, 2001). Within this work, we propose that, despite these problems, the assimilation of morphological constraints, and the usage of statistical prior knowledge from clinical observations, reveals diagnostically useful information. If the morphology of the vascular network, for example, is constrained by a set of time series measurements taken at specific places of the cardiovascular system, it is possible to solve the hemodynamic inverse problem by a carefully designed mathematical forward model in combination with a Bayesian inference technique.