Aortic Valve

The aortic valve regulates blood flow from the left ventricle to the aorta. The crucial physiologic function and complex anatomy have stimulated biomedical engineers to understand and explain the aortic valve behavior using computer models. Even though the first aortic valve models date back to the 70’s, still recently its physiological and pathological behavior has collected great interests. In fact, the increase of population average age and life expectancy make heart valve disease and degeneration a current serious and constantly growing public-health problem, thus requiring appropriate resources to improve diagnosis, treatment, and research. For this reason, the application of computational techniques for heart valve modeling represents a challenging research activity which may lead to the development of methodologies, diagnostic tools, therapeutic devices, materials and innovative prostheses for medical applications and to the prediction of surgical outcomes.

In this context, the research activity of the group focuses on the development of computational tools to support device design and surgical operation planning procedures by means of predictive simulations. In particular, the topics currently under investigation include:

• Transcatheter Aortic Valve Implantation (TAVI)
• Implant of stentless aortic valve
• Aortic Valve Sparing operation
• Geometrical modeling of the aortic valve
• Isogeometric analysis of aortic valve behavior