Study of Mitral stenosis in resting and exercised heart using ABAQUS™

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the leading cause of mortality in India contributing nearly 25% to total mortality. Computational models of the heart are a new tool that can be used to conduct research on such diseases, and test the efficacy of medical devices used in their treatment. Computational models take lesser time to deliver the results, suffer lesser restrictions on the number of samples, and more importantly reduce the testing of medical devices on animals. In this study, we used Living Heart Human Model (LHHM) (v2.0 beta) developed on ABAQUS™, a computational model which consists of both electrical and mechanical models of the adult male human heart, to study the effects of mitral stenosis on heart function; mitral stenosis is a major cause of mortality in India.. We first validated the LHHM model by simulating healthy adult male human heart function. We then evaluated its efficacy for severe mitral stenosis in a randomly selected patient, and found that LHHM predictions matched clinical observations. We proceeded to obtain LHHM predictions for 8 patients with varying degrees of mitral stenosis: comparison with clinical data showed a qualitative and quantitative match for pulmonary capillary pressure but only qualitative match for pulmonary arterial pressure. Simulations were also performed for heart function in mitral stenosis during exercise, but LHHM predictions matched neither quantitatively, nor qualitatively, with data indicating further improvement of the model