The heart has long been seen as a symbol of life, due to its critical function of pumping blood throughout the body. However, despite its importance, we still do not fully understand how the heart works, due to its extremely complex motion and structure. In particular, doctors today are very interested in learning how the heart geometry  may affect cardiac blood flow, and understanding how to use this information to help patients who have suffered heart attacks. However, current imaging techniques, such as MRI or Ultrasound, provide only low-resolution views of blood flow, which do not provide the desired level of detail.

In this talk, I will be presenting how we are using images from high-resolution CT scans to build accurate, animated 3D models of a patient's heart, which are then used as boundary conditions in solving the Navier-Stokes equations using the finite difference method and the immersed boundary method to simulate the ventricular blood flow. This way, we can visualize how the complex structures within the heart interact with the flow and help circulate the blood within the heart, which has never been seen before. I will also show how these techniques can be used to compare the flows through healthy and diseased hearts, in order to potentially assist doctors in diagnosis and treatment. I will also show we can use similar simulation techniques with high-detail aortic valve reconstructions, to better understand how diseased-induced alterations in the blood flow pattern may promote chronic remodeling of the aortic root. Finally, I will discuss how we have modified the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics algorithm to allow for fast and effective boundary collision management to greatly speed up our simulations, to potentially make this technology practical for clinical purposes.