Hemodynamic characterization of localized aortic valve calcifications

Different hemodynamic characteristics of the blood flow can be studied by numerical simulations of the blood flow around the heart valves, which are significantly useful in various fields such as recognition and prediction of cardiovascular diseases, valve surgery, replacement, and advanced design of patient-specific prosthetic valves. One of these common valvular diseases is aortic valve stenosis, which mainly occurs due to the decreased orifice area between the valves’ leaflets and leads to insufficient blood pumping. In the aortic valve, calcification is the main reason for stenosis in which calcium deposits on the leaflets increase their rigidity and consequently prevent them from fully opening and closing. Severe cases of this disease lead to morbidity and mortality. In this work, different localized calcifications of the aortic valve are studied for several grades of this disease and compared with the healthy case. For this purpose, single-phase FSI simulations of blood flow are performed for various degrees of localized calcification patterns and pertinent hemodynamic parameters are obtained. Critical flow parameters, transvalvular indexes and Wall Shear Stress (WSS) based indexes are discussed in detail.