Prosthetic Heart Valves
- I have performed numerical simulations of a novel Trileaflet Mechanical Heart Valve, named Triflo Valve, by employing coupled fluid and structural solvers programmed in C language (in-house code) and parallelized with PETSc (MPI) with a parallel efficiency of around 90%. In this regard, I employed a sharp interface Curvilinear Immersed Boundary (CURVIB) method to solve the governing equations for the blood flow, strongly coupled to a FSI algorithm for solving the leaflet kinematics of the Triflo Valve. A ray-tracing algorithm was used to track the fluid-structure interface, a primary requisite for the sharp interface method. I also worked on a parallelized Eulerian framework to compute the platelet activation in the Triflo Valve and compared it with that in Bio-Prosthetic Valves (BHVs) and Bileaflet Mechanical Heart Valve (BMHV) under similar numerical conditions.
- The Triflo Valve generates a similar physiological field as that observed for native and BHVs, contrary to BMHVs. It is expected to be introduced as a commercial product by Novostia SA, Switzerland after further clinical trials.
I am now investigating the intertwined process of platelet activation and coagulation under prosthetic heart valve flows, by training the available mathematical models with a data-driven, supervised Machine Learning algorithm.