The Heart’s Vortices

Dr. Pavlos Vlachos, Professor, School of Mechnical Engineering and School of Biomedical Engineering, Purdue University

It is estimated that almost one third of the population above the age of forty-five can be suffering from heart diastolic dysfunction, yet appear to have no symptoms. Heart diastolic dysfunction is characterized by the impaired filling efficiency of the heart left ventricle. However, heart compensatory mechanisms and remodeling make diagnosis very difficult as well as introduces great challenges that limit our understanding and hinder the use of experimental methods or computational modeling for investigating the associated physics in-vitro. In this talk, we will explore the flow physics of the left ventricle filling using clinical and laboratory tools and by combining flow physics with medical imaging and clinical pathophysiology. Using Color M-mode Echocardiography (CMM) and phase-contrast Magnetic Resonance Imaging (pcMRI) velocimetry we characterize in-vivo the fluid dynamics in healthy and diseased patients. Based on such data we will show how the vortices forming in the heart evolve and how they play an active role in the presence of disease. We will show mechanisms associated with the filling of the heart that were previously unexplored or even not recognized and will demonstrate how this knowledge can be used not only to understand the processes but classify healthy from diseased patients and lead to new diagnostic tools with significantly improved classification ability and clinical utility. Finally, during the last part of the talk we will survey other research projects pursued in our group such as arterial flows, engineering of tumor micro-environments, flows in insect hearts, aerodynamics of flying snakes, and developments in instrumentation and measurement science.