Seminar title: Cardiovascular flows: From arterial to cellular scale simulations
Abstract: Heart and heart valve diseases are the leading causes of death worldwide as the world population ages. In this talk, recent developments of numerical methods for cardiovascular flows are reviewed to demonstrate the feasibility of applying simulation for both phases: i) early diagnosis and ii) designing prostheses.
Interests are made to the problems of aortic valve replacement and left heart dysfunctions as particular examples. In these examples, the combination of the immersed boundary method in curvilinear system and the standard finite element method are used to perform Fluid-Structure Interaction simulations under healthy and diseased conditions. In such cases, high resolution simulation results are compared with the measurements from laboratory experiments and in-vivo data. The simulation data show that hemodynamics of heart/valvular diseases are more complicated than previously thought. In these cases, transient phenomena such as vortex formation and breakups are ubiquitous.
Quantifying such phenomena could lead to new ways of early diagnosing as well as monitoring the diseases. Design of prostheses and virtual surgery are demonstrated using the current computational framework with patient-specific inputs. New developments of integrating non-invasive modalities such as 4D-Flow MRI measurement with numerical simulation is also discussed. Finally, the role of cardiovascular flows with cancer metastases will be explored and briefly discussed.
Speaker biography: Dr. Trung Bao Le is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at North Dakota State University, United States. He is the recipient of national and international awards including the Gallery of Fluid Motion (American Physical Society – Division of Fluid Dynamics) and a pre-doctoral fellowship from United States National Academies.
He obtained his bachelor’s degree at Thuy Loi University in Vietnam, master’s degree at Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand and PhD degree at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on fundamental phenomena in biofluids problems. In particular, the main theme of his research is studying vortex structures resulted from fluid-structure interaction processes.
His expertise involves the development for scalable numerical algorithms that can run from desktop computer to supercomputers. Applications for such algorithms are in several key areas including: i) hemodynamics of cardiovascular diseases, ii) designing of prosthetic valves; and iii) fluid mechanics of cancer.