Pierre-Frédéric Villard
University of Lorraine
Loria, France
Common surgical procedures on mitral heart valves include chordae structure modifications. Such interventions will happen when there is an extensive prolapse of a leaflet caused by chordae rupture or chordae elongation. Understanding and simulating the importance of chordae tendineae before operating could be helpful in order to anticipate if the mitral valve will maintain a consistent closure shape during the systolic peak. Biomechanical modeling and simulation can achieve such a goal.
I will present a method to semi-automatically build a mitral valve biomechanical model from micro CT scan: after manually picking chordae fiducial points, the leaflets are segmented and the boundary conditions as well as the loading conditions are automatically defined. Fast FEM simulation is carried out using SOFA (Simulation Open Framework Architecture) to reproduce leaflets closing during systolic peak. We validate our method on three explanted porcine hearts and show that our model perform well: point-to-surface error around 1mm, reasonably large coaptation surface and no leak at the systolic peak. Paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/rcs.1880