Identifying the key anatomical features that affect blood flow in the pulmonary arteries of congenital heart patients
The applicant is working towards her PhD on blood flow dynamics simulations in adult patients with congenital heart disease under the supervision of Dr A Kazakidi, University of Strathclyde. The project involves the investigation of the hemodynamic environment in these patients. Idealized two-dimensional models of the pulmonary bifurcation have been created and the effect of geometrical characteristics, such as the branching angle and origin, has been studied. Currently, the process is being extended to 3D geometries. This would greatly benefit from having patient-specific data from a younger population cohort in order to understand the development of the adult configuration.
Dr Schievano’s lab has established expertise in computational modelling of congenital hearts at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. A unique library of patient-specific geometries is available in her group and would be a valuable source of identifying anatomical variations in the pulmonary bifurcation for this group of patients. During this short research visit, these geometrical characteristics will be studied to help validate the idealised model results. More specifically, the centrelines of the patient-specific geometries will be identified and analysed using in-house software to post-process the geometric data.