Clinical simulation of aortic valve: a narrative review

INTRODUCTION About 30 percent of the worldwide death is due to cardiovascular diseases. Clinical simulation is a promising filed that can help to understand diseases, their nature and intervention's effects. The simulated models are flexible and make it easy to study the changes' effects and help to select the appropriate interventions. This narrative review aims to report common methods for the clinical simulation and its merits focusing on the cardiovascular field especially those pertaining to the aortic valve. METHOD The search was conducted on google scholar and PubMed in August and September of 2014 with three queries' categories. We searched among English papers with no limitation on the published year. A qualitative-interpretive approach was used for data extraction. RESULTS Computational fluid dynamic (CFD) is used to simulate and study body structures, systems and their common phenomena. Its two common methods for cardiovascular simulations are Finite Element Method (FEM) and Finite Volume Method (FVM). There were two kinds of the aortic valve simulation: dry models and Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) models. Unlike the dry model, FSI models consider the interaction between blood flow and tissue. Clinical simulation is a promising field allowing statistical analysis and can be used in clinical decision support systems (CDSS) or as a virtual experimental platform as a training system.