A COMPUTATIONAL FLUID DYNAMICS MODEL OF FAILING FONTAN CIRCULATION FOR USE IN THE DESIGN OF A NOVEL TREATMENT

摘要

Patients with failing Fontan circulation can often have elevated venous blood pressures and reduced cardiac output. There is currently no short-term non-invasive treatment to bridge these patients to transplant or further surgical intervention. It is the overall goal of this project to develop a cannula-pump system as this treatment option. As a first step, we have defined a representative geometry for the Fontan circulation along with appropriate physiological boundary conditions. We have also defined a lumped parameter model to couple to the three-dimensional geometry in a closed loop. Preliminary computational fluid dynamics simulation results are presented along with a description of the limitations of our study and our plans for future work.