Lakshmi Dasi, The Ohio State University

Michael Sacks, University of Texas at Austin

Heart valve disease is a major component of heart disease and the significance of this disease is rising primarily due to increasing life expectancy as well as new percutaneous treatments becoming available to older patient populations who would otherwise only receive medical management. Treatments for severe heart valve disease vary from replacement with prosthetic heart valves or performing repair or implantation of palliative devices to improve valvular function. Unfortunately, current and past replacement and repair devices have not “solved” the problem due to continuing issues related to occurrence of complications (e.g. thromboembolism, need for pacemaker etc.) or compromise of valve function (e.g. structural deterioration of prosthetic leaflets, recurrence of mitral regurgitation after repair, valve leakage etc.) or the unintended introduction of a new problem (e.g. new issues resulting from the need for anticoagulation therapy). All of these complications are highly patient specific in nature and therefore a new emerging paradigm is the development of personalized heart valve replacement or repair therapy. In this symposium, we will bring together and discuss novel approaches necessary to elevate biofluid and solid mechanics modeling towards the paradigm of personalized/precision medicine. We expect a mix of talks ranging from medical image based computational fluid-structure modeling, 3D printing and related in-vitro approaches, and ex-vivo mechano-biological modeling of patient specific disease processes. By bringing researchers focused on these different methodologies we hope to spark new synergistic approaches in the general field of applied mechanics.

Keywords:  human health, biomechanics