The proposal deals with understanding the flow dynamics in normal and diseased coronary artery, the disease affecting millions of people, and the leading cause of death in United States. The PI’s long term plans are to use her unique expertise in large-scale-simulations and fluid dynamics to develop novel bio-engineering tools to simulate blood-flow in a diseased coronary artery. This approach will be a vital step towards interdisciplinary bio-engineering/clinical efforts to achieve breakthrough in detection, diagnosis, and treatment of coronary artery disease. The proposal aims at establishing the criteria for the characterization of the coronary artery. Based on theoretical understanding of turbulent flows, a set of metrics will be identified to differentiate a normal from a diseased artery. The outcome of this pilot proposal is well-defined metrics for coronary artery characterization, and these metrics will be the basis to begin detailed investigation of the coronary artery disease using large-scale realistic simulations. The following is the research progress achieved so far,
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The PI has established strong collaboration with medical imaging group at Cleveland Clinic Foundation. Large scale simulations are planned based on realistic plaque morphology of 42 patients who underwent IVUS (intra-vascular ultrasound) at Cleveland Clinic. As a preliminary analysis the data has been classified using fuzzy logic analysis and this has resulted in four distinct types (Manuscipt submitted: K.Bhaganagar, R.Beaumont, B.Segee, B.Ozer, Using fuzzy logic for Morphological Classification of IVUS-based plaques in Coronary artery in the context of hydrodynamics (in review)).
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Numerical tool to perform the simulations has been developed. (Manuscript: K.Bhaganagar Turbulent flow simulations using DNS to investigate flow in stenotic channel, Physics of Fluids (Accepted with revisions)) and (Manuscipt: K.Bhaganagar, Effect of roughness on pulsative flows at high Reynolds number flows ( in review))
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Numerical tool has been tested and preliminary analysis has demonstrated inter-type flow alterations are very significant compared to intra-type flow alterations.
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Numerical simulations needs to be performed by introducing more realistic parameters (a) pulsative flow (b) pipe flow geometry (c) Coronary physics
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Realistic geometry and flow conditions will be a important step (a) Early detection of the disease (b) Determine placement of interventional stents based on flow characteristics