3D Image-Based Computational Modeling for Patient-Specific Mechanical Analysis of Human Heart Right Ventricles

Right ventricular dysfunction is one of the more common causes of heart failure in patients with congenital heart defects. Use of computer-assisted procedures is becoming more and more popular in clinical decision making process and computer-aided surgeries. In this paper, a MRI-based patient-specific 3D computational model with fluid-structure interactions (FSI) for human right ventricle (RV) is introduced to perform mechanical analysis of flow and stress/strain distributions in RV. RV morphology and motion of a healthy human volunteer were acquired by using planar tagged MRI. The FSI model was solved using a commercial finite element package ADINA and preliminary results are presented. Our final goal is to use computational simulations to replace empirical and often risky clinical experimentation to examine the efficiency and suitability of various reconstructive procedures in diseased hearts so that optimal design can be found.