Medical image-based analysis of flow in heart with congenital heart disease: Numerical simulation of intraventricular flow

Quantitatively analyze the characteristics of intraventricular flow is critical for the diagnosis of congenital heart disease (CHD). Although several techniques are applied in clinic currently, the information which they provided is not satisfied with the requirement of the therapies of CHD. Here, we introduced the method of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to investigate the intraventricular hemodynamics using a reconstructed model of left ventricle (LV) based on cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images. A large, counterclockwise, vortex was observed. It persisted in the periods of slow filling phase and atrial contraction phase in diastole. A smaller vortex was found around the outflow tract. An annular vortex is formed in the base region downstream of the mitral orifice. The vortices vanished quickly at the end-diastole. These results indicate the technique of CFD is a promising tool which can be used to evaluate the hemodynamics in LV. Understanding the characteristics of intraventricular flow is helpful for the improvement of CHD.