Computational and experimental evaluation of a novel assistive cardio-vascular device
- Academic lead
- Ali Alazmani (School of Mechanical Engineering) and Zinedine Khatir (School of Mechanical Engineering)
- Industrial lead
- Osama Jaber (Leeds General Infirmary)
- Co-supervisor(s)
- Peter Culmer (School of Mechanical Engineering), Daniel Lesnic (School of Mathematics)
- Project themes
- Bio-Engineering/Medical Fluid Flows
This project aims to investigate the effectiveness of a novel flow control device to treat single ventricle heart defects, using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations combined with fluid flow-enabled robotics. In particular, we explore how soft flexible non-blood-contacting Fontan (i.e. deformable tube to by-pass the non-functional ventricle and establish a direct connection between the systemic venous and pulmonary arterial circulations) affects the different fluid dynamics and univentricular circulation in such peculiar fluid flow geometries.
Illustration: Geometry and flow circulation
Together with CFD, we will use robotics-enabled experimentation together with geometric MRI data to develop the computational flow models and an active cardio-vascular system in this project. This study is expected to make a fundamentally important contribution to the science of implantable systems and may have a medically significant impact on the design of new cavopulmonary assistance technologies.