A novel computational model of left heart hemodynamics improves upon traditional reduced models by mitigating artificial pressure oscillations and accurately capturing isovolumetric phases.
The combination of reduced models of cardiac valve dynamics with a one-way kinematic uncoupling of blood flow and electromechanics is a widespread approach for reducing the complexity of cardiac hemodynamics simulations. This comes, however, with a number of shortcomings: artificial pressure oscillations, missing isovolumetric phases, and valve laws without precise continuous formulation. This paper is aimed at overcoming these three difficulties while still mitigating computational cost. A novel reduced model of valve dynamics is proposed in which unidirectional flow is enforced in a mathematically sound fashion. Artificial pressure oscillations are overcome by considering a fluid-structure interaction model, which couples bi-ventricular electromechanics and blood flow in the left cavities. The interface coupling is solved in a partitioned fashion via an unconditionally stable loosely coupled scheme. A priori energy estimates are derived for both the continuous coupled problem and its numerical approximation. The benefits and limitations of the proposed approaches are illustrated in a comprehensive numerical study.
Ruz et al. (Mon,) studied this question.