Comprehensive numerical modelling of the human left ventricle from 3D echocardiography

While echocardiography has relative attractions in term of cost and patient comfort, traditionally its lack of accuracy has limited its use. However, a new project involving three-dimensional echocardiography combined with appropriate image-processing, allows the reconstruction of the ventricular endocardial surface for an entire cardiac cycle and with quantitative confidence. The second novel approach is that of the use of commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics codes, able to treat the full three-dimensional pulsatile flow of blood in arbitrary, time dependent 3-D vessels. Again, quantitative predictive reliability has been achieved in arterial flow contexts. We present here a synergy of the above, by integrating the image-processed echo data with the CFD pre-processing stage, and hence obtaining the full simulation of haemodynamics for a given set of clinical measurements. The medical relevance of such a scheme could include surgery and teaching besides research. Our ultimate intention is also to model numerically the behaviour of the ventricular muscle structure, and hence to couple the haemodynamic-muscle predictions. This would also be of considerable clinical value.