Key result
Modeled LV trabeculae carneae cause near-wall flow separation and locally reduce wall shear stress.
Why the study?
Internal wall structures such as trabeculae carneae and papillary muscle may reduce near-wall blood flow in the left ventricle, potentially contributing to thrombus formation, but their effects are not well understood.
Computational modeling demonstrates that trabeculae carneae structures in the left ventricle alter near-wall blood flow and decrease wall shear stress, which may have implications for understanding thrombus formation.
Trabecular structures may refine LV thrombus risk estimates in models; leaves open in vivo validation before clinical translation.
Although the blood flow velocity in a left ventricle (LV) has been considered to be sufficiently fast to prevent thrombus formation, internal wall structures, such as trabeculae carneae (TC) and papillary muscle, recently received attention as possible causes of reduced near-wall blood flow. As a fundamental consideration of this problem, this study established a method for constructing an unsteady LV model from magnetic resonance (MR) images and investigated the effect of a few simplified TC structures on the blood flow in the model. The LV model at arbitrary time steps was constructed by deforming a computational mesh generated from MR images at a reference time step. The validity of the proposed construction scheme was confirmed by comparison with the configuration of an LV model extracted from MR images. Numerical analysis was performed for the unsteady blood flow in LV models with and without two simplified TC structures. The flow field in the model with the internal structure differed from that in the model without the internal structure near the wall, and flow separation caused by the internal structure decreased wall shear stress on the rear of the internal structure. The computational results provide fundamental information for the complex interaction between the internal structures and the blood flow in an LV.
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Yamada et al. (2018) studied Healthy (n=1). Simplified trabeculae carneae (TC) structures vs. Left ventricle model without internal structures (smooth wall) was evaluated on Wall shear stress (WSS) and blood flow velocity. Incorporating simplified trabeculae carneae structures into a computational left ventricle model caused near-wall flow separation and locally decreased wall shear stress compared to a smooth-walled model.
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