Numerical modeling of blood flow in patient-specific right ventricle with pulmonary arterial hypertension based on MRI

Abstract

Right ventricle (RV) transposes deoxygenated oxygen to the lungs at much lower pressure but with similar volume as the left ventricle (LV). Unlike the elliptical LV, the RV is funnel-shaped with crescent cross section in the short-axis direction. In part due to its complex anatomy, the studies on the ventricular flow are quite limited, as compared with LV. In addition, RV dilation is expected, when pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is present, and the alternation of ventricular flow has not been studied to the best of our knowledge. In this study, a normal subject and a PAH patient were selected for MRI scans, based on which the time-resolved RV geometries were reconstructed. To model the patient-specific ventricular flow, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) was utilized with dynamic mesh method enabled. The simulation results showed that the ventricular flow in both normal and PAH RVs were smoother than that in LV, especially at the mid and apical regions. The vortex structure indicated that deeper penetration of transtricuspid flow into RV in the normal subject.