AEROSPACE ENGINEERING

Abstract

The mammalian heart has been sculpted by millions of years of evolution into a flow pump par excellence. During the typical lifetime of a human, the heart will beat more than 3 billion times and pump enough blood to fill more than 60 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Each of these billions of cardiac cycles is itself a manifestation of a complex and elegant interplay between several distinct physical domains including electrophysiology and mechanics of the cardiac muscles, hemodynamics, and flow-induced movement of the cardiac valves. Another multiphysics interaction that is key to hemostasis involves hemodynamics and blood biochemistry. The clotting cascade, which is a natural response to injury, is initiated by a sequence of biochemical and biomolecular reactions that are strongly modulated by local flow conditions. In this regard, how the chambers and valves of a healthy heart manage to avoid thrombosis, remains an open question. The presence of heart conditions such as myocardial infarction (MI), cardiomyopathies, valve anomalies, and atrial fibrillations, disturb the hemostatic balance and can lead to thrombosis with devastating sequelae such as stroke and MI. Computational models for thrombogenesis in the cardiac system have the potential to provide useful insights into this important phenomenon. In my talk, I will describe high-fidelity chemo-fluidic modeling of thrombogenesis in the left heart and demonstrate how fundamental insights from these studies have been translated into clinically relevant metrics. Application of these models to thrombogenesis in transcatheter aortic valves will also be described.

Speaker

Professor Rajat Mittal

Professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University with a secondary appointment in the School of Medicine. He received a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur in 1989, a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Florida in 1991, and a doctorate degree in applied mechanics from the University of Illinois in 1995. He joined the Center for Turbulence Research at Stanford University as a postdoctoral fellow in 1995, where he conducted research in large-eddy simulation of bluff-body wakes. His research interests include computational fluid dynamics, vortex dominated flows, immersed boundary methods, bioinspired and biomedical engineering, and flow control, and he has more than 150 archival publications in these areas. He is the recipient of the 1996 Francois Frenkiel Award from the Division of Fluid Dynamics of the American Physical Society, and the 2006 Lewis Moody Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the American Physical Society and an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Computational Physics and Frontiers of Computational Physiology and Medicine and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Experimental Biologythese studies have been translated into clinically relevant metrics. Application of these models to thrombogenesis in transcatheter aortic valves will also be described.