Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Method Applied to Cardiovascular Flows

INTRODUCTION Investigation of blood flow behavior in the left ventricle (LV) during the filling phase (diastolic phase) is of great interest to biomedical engineering and cardiology. In the process of detection/ refinement of heart diseases, physicians can only rely on the clinical data and their personal experience. It is important, therefore, to develop decision tools that can help surgeons testing, in silico, hemodynamic conditions of a patient. Following this idea, there was, during the last decades, a growing interest in computational modeling of the flow in the circulatory system under normal and pathological conditions. The most significant difficulty in traditional Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) methods is related to the mesh generation and re-meshing process required in problems with deformable boundaries like for the simulation of cardiovascular flows. Moreover, these methods generate some data that do not contribute in direct clinical decisions. An alternative to overcome these limitations can be the new generation of numerical methods called meshfree methods.