3D echocardiographic imaging and modeling: Towards the patient-specific virtual mitral valve

Finite element models (FEMs) have been already widely used to analyze mitral valve (MV) biomechanics. Recently, strategies to implement patient-specific, image-based FEMs of the MV were proposed, improving their realism. In particular, we proposed to implement MV FEMs from real time 3D transthoracic echocardiographic imaging. To allow a future clinical use of this approach as a support tool for MV surgical planning, we applied it to three healthy and three regurgitant MVs, to test for its capacity in discriminating between physiological and pathological MV function, in realistically capturing location and extent of the regurgitating areas, and in quantifying the biomechanical anomalies associated to MV regurgitation. MV FEMs proved able to simulate both physiological and pathological MV function, thus confirming the ability of this promising approach in potentially being applied as support tool for surgical planning.