Fast generation of 3D flow obstacles from parametric surface models: application to cardiac valves

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast, efficient method for generating resistive flow obstacles from parametric surface models of heart valves, enabling rapid updates in fluid-structure interaction simulations without mesh alterations.

Contribution

The authors develop a novel pipeline using adaptive sampling and distance algorithms to quickly compute valve surfaces from parametric models, reducing computational costs in cardiac flow simulations.

Findings

The method accurately models aortic and mitral valves.

It significantly reduces computation time for mesh node classification.

The approach is flexible for different valve geometries.

Abstract

Due to the computationally demanding nature of fluid-structure interaction simulations, heart valve simulation is a complex task. A simpler alternative is to model the valve as a resistive flow obstacle that can be updated dynamically without altering the mesh, but this approach can also become computationally expensive for large meshes. In this work, we present a fast method for computing the resistive flow obstacle of a heart valve. The method is based on a parametric surface model of the valve, which is defined by a set of curves. The curves are adaptively sampled to create a polyline representation, which is then used to generate the surface. The surface is represented as a set of points, allowing for efficient distance calculations to determine whether mesh nodes belong to the valve surface. We introduce three algorithms for computing these distances: minimization, sampling, and triangulation. Additionally, we implement two mesh traversal strategies: exhaustive node iteration and recursive neighbor search. The latter significantly reduces the number of distance calculations by only considering neighboring nodes. Our pipeline is demonstrated on both a previously reported aortic valve model and a newly proposed mitral valve model, highlighting its flexibility and efficiency for rapid valve shape updates in computational simulations.