Patient-specific blood flows and vortex formations in patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy using computational fluid dynamics

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is a relatively common genetic cardiac disorder in which a portion of the myocardium becomes hypertrophied. Dynamic left ventricle outflow tract obstruction is present and associated with worsened symptom severity and disease progression. However, its mechanism is still not fully understood, and the complex interaction between the thickened ventricular wall and altered blood flow in patient-specific model has not been studied. In this study, we recruited one patient with HCM and one healthy volunteer who underwent magnetic resonance imaging scans. The patient-specific geometries were reconstructed, and both spatial and temporal interpolations were applied to increase the corresponding resolutions. The results showed that HCM patient had cirrostratus-cloud like vortex structures rather than a major vortex ring observed in healthy subject, which implies that the vortex formation from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation has the potential to diagnose HCM.