Pierre-Frédéric Villard
University of Lorraine
In this talk, I will present my current work on mitral valve modeling. The mitral valve is one of the heart valves and many pathologies damage it, potentially leading to heart failure. The aim of this work is to study tools to help surgical repair of the valve.
A first study has been done on the extraction of the valve geometry from medical images. I will present a fully-automatic pipeline to extract the valve chordae architecture compatible with a computational model. First, an initial segmentation is obtained by a sub-mesh topology analysis and a RANSAC-like model-fitting approach. Then the chordal structure is optimized with respect to objective functions based on mechanical, anatomical and image-based considerations.
I will then present a fluid-structure interaction model of the valve closure under blood flow. Due to the highly non-linear nature of the problem, capturing contact in fluid-structure interaction simulation is a challenging task. I will present a model based on the immersed boundary method that captures a map of contact and perfect closure of the mitral valve, without the presence of orifice holes, which often appear with existing methods.