Sciences Naturelles et de l'Ingénieur

Numerical Simulation of the Cardiovascular System

This research project aims at the development, analysis and computer implementation of mathematical models for the cardiovascular system. Our goal is to simulate the physiological response of the human cardiovascular system in healthy or diseased states. This project addresses many fundamental issues. Blood flow interacts both mechanically and chemically with the vessel walls and tissues, giving rise to complex coupled multiphysics problems. This aspect requires the understanding of transport, diffusion and reaction within the blood and organs of the body. Simulating the mechanical interaction between the blood flow and the arterial wall requires specialized algorithms and is computationally expensive. In particular, we plan to simulate atherosclerosis stenosis and aneurisms. The emphasis of this project will be put on algorithm implementation, computational efficiency, validation and verification.
HPC resources are necessary to both be able to perform the simulations, dur to the complexity of the problem, and to lower the time to solution. The simulations relies LifeV, a LGPL finite element library developed in the group in collaboration with Polytecnico di Milano and Emory University.