Computational approach to left ventricular flow for developing clinical applications

It is now possible to simulate flow in various organs in detail, due to the rapid advances in computational technology. Our ultimate goal is to build a system that can assist clinicians in diagnosis, treatment planning, and as patients differ in terms of anatomical configuration and disease condition, a wide variety of patient data must be accumulated, not only for statistical analysis but also to improve the processing system. While the computer simulation of a phenomenon plays a key role in this success, it is still necessary to elucidate the mechanism that elicits a phenomenon inside the patient’s body. This paper gives brief descriptions of heart anatomy and physiology, reviews the past in vivo, in vitro and numerical studies on the left ventricular flow and introduces the recent attempts on computational fluid modeling of the left ventricular flow and its clinical applications. The studies demonstrate that computational modeling of intraventricular flow has great potential to advance clinical diagnosis of the left ventricular function.