Simulation of blood flow in human aorta for extracorporal circulation

Abstract

Paper presented at the 7th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Turkey, 19-21 July, 2010.

Extracorporeal circulation is a standard technique in cardiovascular surgery, which can be applied in different variations. Using computational fluid dynamics, the impact of a particular perfusion technique for a certain patient can be simulated preoperatively, by considering the patient-specific physiology. By the developed procedure, the real geometry of the aorta of an individual patient can be captured and analyzed. The pulsatile and steady-state physiological blood flow, as well as the antegrade perfusion are computationally investigated for a patient, who exhibits some anomalies in the aorta physiology. The same flow configurations are investigated for a rather idealized aorta, without any apparent anomaly. The results are compared. It is demonstrated that the consequences of the antegrade perfusion for an abmormal and idealized/lnormal aorta tum out to be different, depending on the details of the aorta physiology. This comparison indicates that it is advisable to perform a patient-specific detailed computational analysis in advance, for the patients with abnormal physiology, instead of assuming a normal behavior for extracorporeal circulation.