Most heart diseases are associated with and reflected by the sounds that the heart produces. Heart auscultation, defined as listening to the heart sound, has been a very important method for the early diagnosis of cardiac dysfunction. Traditional auscultation requires substantial clinical experience and good listening skills. The emergence of the electronic stethoscope has paved the way for a new field of computer-aided auscultation. This article provides an in-depth study of (1) the electronic stethoscope technology, and (2) the methodology for diagnosis of cardiac disorders based on computer-aided auscultation. The paper is based on a comprehensive review of (1) literature articles, (2) market (state-of-the-art) products, and (3) smartphone stethoscope apps. It covers in depth every key component of the computer-aided system with electronic stethoscope, from sensor design, front-end circuitry, denoising algorithm, heart sound segmentation, to the final machine learning techniques. Our intent is to provide an informative and illustrative presentation of the electronic stethoscope, which is valuable and beneficial to academics, researchers and engineers in the technical field, as well as to medical professionals to facilitate its use clinically. The paper provides the technological and medical basis for the development and commercialization of a real-time integrated heart sound detection, acquisition and quantification system.

In this paper, coronary arterial bypass grafting hemodynamics and anastomosis designs are reviewed. The paper specifically addresses the biomechanical factors for enhancement of the patency of coronary artery bypass grafts (CABGs). Stenosis of distal anastomosis, caused by thrombosis and intimal hyperplasia (IH), is the major cause of failure of CABGs. Strong correlations have been established between the hemodynamics and vessel wall biomechanical factors and the initiation and development of IH and thrombus formation. Accordingly, several investigations have been conducted and numerous anastomotic geometries and devices have been designed to better regulate the blood flow fields and distribution of hemodynamic parameters and biomechanical factors at the distal anastomosis, in order to enhance the patency of CABGs. Enhancement of longevity and patency rate of CABGs can eliminate the need for re-operation and can significantly lower morbidity, and thereby reduces medical costs for patients suffering from coronary stenosis. This invited review focuses on various endeavors made thus far to design a patency-enhancing optimized anastomotic configuration for the distal junction of CABGs.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD), the leading cause of death today, incorporates a wide range of cardiovascular system malfunctions that affect heart functionality. It is believed that the hemodynamic loads exerted on the cardiovascular system, the left ventricle (LV) in particular, are the leading cause of CVD initiation and propagation. Moreover, it is believed that the diagnosis and prognosis of CVD at an early stage could reduce its high mortality and morbidity rate. Therefore, a set of robust clinical cardiovascular assessment tools has been introduced to compute the cardiovascular hemodynamics in order to provide useful insights to physicians to recognize indicators leading to CVD and also to aid the diagnosis of CVD. Recently, a combination of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and different medical imaging tools, image-based CFD (IB-CFD), has been widely employed for cardiovascular functional assessment by providing reliable hemodynamic parameters. Even though the capability of CFD to provide reliable flow dynamics in general fluid mechanics problems has been widely demonstrated for many years, up to now, the clinical implications of the IB-CFD patient-specific LVs have not been applicable due to its limitations and complications. In this paper, we review investigations conducted to numerically simulate patient-specific human LV over the past 15 years using IB-CFD methods. Firstly, we divide different studies according to the different LV types (physiological and different pathological conditions) that have been chosen to reconstruct the geometry, and then discuss their contributions, methodologies, limitations, and findings. In this regard, we have studied CFD simulations of intraventricular flows and related cardiology insights, for (i) Physiological patient-specific LV models, (ii) Pathological heart patient-specific models, including myocardial infarction, dilated cardiomyopathy, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and hypoplastic left heart syndrome. Finally, we discuss the current stage of the IB-CFD LV simulations in order to mimic realistic hemodynamics of patient-specific LVs. We can conclude that heart flow simulation is on the right track for developing into a useful clinical tool for heart function assessment, by (i) incorporating most of heart structures’ (such as heart valves) operations, and (ii) providing useful diagnostic indices based hemodynamic parameters, for routine adoption in clinical usage.

This paper presents quantitative analysis of blood flow shear stress by measuring the carotid arterial wall shear stress (WSS) and the intima-media thickness (IMT) of experimental rabbits fed with high-fat feedstuff on a weekly basis in order to cause atherosclerosis. This study is based on establishing an atherosclerosis model of high-fat rabbits, and measuring the rabbits’ common carotid arterial WSS of the experimental group and control group on a weekly basis. Detailed analysis was performed by using WSS quantification. We have demonstrated small significant difference of rabbit carotid artery WSS between the experimental group and the control group (P<0.01) from the 1st week onwards, while the IMT of experimental group had larger differences from 5th week compared with the control group (P<0.05). Next, we have shown that with increasing blood lipids, the rabbit carotid artery shear stress decreases and the rabbit carotid artery IMT goes up. The decrease of shear stress appears before the start of IMT growth. Furthermore, our receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curve analysis showed that when the mean value of shear stress is 1.198 dyne/cm2, the rabbit common carotid atherosclerosis fatty streaks sensitivity is 89.8%, and the specificity is 81.3%. The area under the ROC curve is 0.9283. All these data goes to show that WSS decreasing to 1.198 dyne/cm2 can be used as an indicator that rabbit common carotid artery comes into the period of fibrous plaques. In conclusion, our study is able to find and confirm that the decrease of the arterial WSS can predict the occurrence of atherosclerosis earlier, and offer help for positive clinical intervention.

Cardiac dysfunction constitutes common cardiovascular health issues in the society, and has been an investigation topic of strong focus by researchers in the medical imaging community. Diagnostic modalities based on echocardiography, magnetic resonance imaging, chest radiography and computed tomography are common techniques that provide cardiovascular structural information to diagnose heart defects. However, functional information of cardiovascular flow, which can in fact be used to support the diagnosis of many cardiovascular diseases with a myriad of hemodynamics performance indicators, remains unexplored to its full potential. Some of these indicators constitute important cardiac functional parameters affecting the cardiovascular abnormalities. With the advancement of computer technology that facilitates high speed computational fluid dynamics, the realization of a support diagnostic platform of hemodynamics quantification and analysis can be achieved. This article reviews the state-of-the-art medical imaging and high fidelity multi-physics computational analyses that together enable reconstruction of cardiovascular structures and hemodynamic flow patterns within them, such as of the left ventricle (LV) and carotid bifurcations. The combined medical imaging and hemodynamic analysis enables us to study the mechanisms of cardiovascular disease-causing dysfunctions, such as how (1) cardiomyopathy causes left ventricular remodeling and loss of contractility leading to heart failure, and (2) modeling of LV construction and simulation of intra-LV hemodynamics can enable us to determine the optimum procedure of surgical ventriculation to restore its contractility and health This combined medical imaging and hemodynamics framework can potentially extend medical knowledge of cardiovascular defects and associated hemodynamic behavior and their surgical restoration, by means of an integrated medical image diagnostics and hemodynamic performance analysis framework.