The strong coupling between the flow in coronary vessels and the mechanical deformation of the myocardial tissue is a central feature of cardiac physiology and must therefore be accounted for by models of coronary perfusion. Currently available geometrically explicit vascular models fail to capture this interaction satisfactorily, are numerically intractable for whole organ simulations, and are difficult to parameterise in human contexts. To address these issues, in this study, a finite element formulation of an incompressible, poroelastic model of myocardial perfusion is presented. Using high-resolution ex vivo imaging data of the coronary tree, the permeability tensors of the porous medium were mapped onto a mesh of the corresponding left ventricular geometry. The resultant tensor field characterises not only the distinct perfusion regions that are observed in experimental data, but also the wide range of vascular length scales present in the coronary tree, through a multi-compartment porous model. Finite deformation mechanics are solved using a macroscopic constitutive law that defines the coupling between the fluid and solid phases of the porous medium. Results are presented for the perfusion of the left ventricle under passive inflation that show wall-stiffening associated with perfusion, and that show the significance of a non-hierarchical multi-compartment model within a particular perfusion territory.

From basic science to translation, modern biomedical research demands computational models which integrate several interacting physical systems. This paper describes the infrastructural framework f...

In this paper we numerically simulate flow in a helical tube for physiological conditions using a co-ordinate mapping of the Navier–Stokes equations. Helical geometries have been proposed for use as bypass grafts, arterial stents and as an idealized model for the out-of-plane curvature of arteries. Small amplitude helical tubes are also currently being investigated for possible application as A–V shunts, where preliminary in vivo tests suggest a possibly lower risk of thrombotic occlusion. In-plane mixing induced by the geometry is hypothesized to be an important mechanism. In this work, we focus mainly on a Reynolds number of 250 and investigate both the flow structure and the in-plane mixing in helical geometries with fixed pitch of 6 tube diameters (D), and centerline helical radius ranging from 0.1D to 0.5D. High-order particle tracking, and an information entropy measure is used to analyze the in-plane mixing. A combination of translational and rotational reference frames are shown to explain the apparent discrepancy between flow field and particle trajectories, whereby particle paths display a pattern characteristic of a double vortex, though the flow field reveals only a single dominant vortex. A radius of 0.25D is found to provide the best trade-off between mixing and pressure loss, with little increase in mixing above R = 0.25D, whereas pressure continues to increase linearly.