Developing a Computational Model for a Novel, Peristaltic-Style Ventricular Assist Device

Single ventricle heart defects are a serious subset of congenital heart defects (CHDs) caused by the underdevelopment of one side of the heart. Many of these univentricular CHDs are treated with a combination of palliative surgeries, culminating in the Fontan procedure. These Fontan patients lack cardiac support between the systemic vascular return and pulmonary system. Several researchers have suggested a cavopulmonary assist device to reverse the hemodynamic decay experienced by these patients.A peristaltic-style flow pump could be a possible solution as a cavopulmonary assist device. Such a novel flow pump uses balloons to produce forward flow by squeezing a graft in individual actuation zones. In this study, the mechanics of this pump are computationally modeled so that, given a set of boundary pressure conditions, the model calculates the impact of the device on the surrounding flow rates. In the future, this computational model can be placed in a full body lumped parameter network (LPN) to identify the effect this flow rate impact has on patient hemodynamics. This model was tuned using two sets of experimental data and validated with six additional data sets. A good qualitative match was achieved in the tuning data sets and four of the validation sets. These data sets had NMRSE values between 19% and 27%. A poor qualitative match was seen in two validation data sets, with NMRSE values of 30% and 37%