Patient-Specific Virtual Intervention Laboratory to Prevent Stroke

Atrial fibrillation (AF), the most common human arrhythmia, is a marker of an increased risk of embolic stroke. However, recent studies suggest that AF may not be mechanistically responsible for the stroke events. An alternative explanation for the mechanism of intracardiac thrombosis and stroke in patients with AF is structural remodeling of the left atrium (LA). However, a mechanistic link between LA structural remodeling and intracardiac thrombosis is unclear, because there is no clinically feasible methodology to evaluate the complex relationship between these two phenomena in individual patients. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a powerful tool that could potentially link LA structural remodeling and intracardiac thrombosis in individual patients by evaluating the patient-specific LA blood flow characteristics. However, the lack of knowledge of the material and mechanical properties of the heart wall in specific patients makes it challenging to solve the complexity of fluid-structure interaction. JHU inventors developed a clinically feasible methodology to perform personalized blood flow analysis within the heart. They propose an alternative computational approach to perform personalized blood flow analysis by providing the three-dimensional LA endocardial surface motion estimated from patient-specific cardiac CT images.Their CT-based, personalized LA blood flow analysis is a clinically feasible methodology that can be used to improve understanding of the mechanism of intracardiac thrombosis and stroke in individual patients with LA structural remodeling.
 

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