Medical engineering & physics
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Each year, approximately 300,000 heart valve repair or replacement procedures are performed worldwide, including approximately 70,000 aortic valve replacement surgeries in the United States alone. Computational platforms for simulating cardiovascular devices such as prosthetic heart valves promise to improve device design and assist in treatment planning, including patient-specific device selection. This paper describes progress in constructing anatomically and physiologically realistic immersed boundary (IB) models of the dynamics of the aortic root and ascending aorta. ⋯ Numerical tests show that the model is able to resolve the leaflet biomechanics in diastole and early systole at practical grid spacings. The model is also used to examine differences in the mechanics and fluid dynamics yielded by fresh valve leaflets and glutaraldehyde-fixed leaflets similar to those used in bioprosthetic heart valves. Although there are large differences in the leaflet deformations during diastole, the differences in the open configurations of the valve models are relatively small, and nearly identical hemodynamics are obtained in all cases considered.