Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer of both men and women in the United States. Simulation is one of the latest tools being utilized in attacking this deadly disease. As a member of the Cardiovascular Engineering Group at the University of Texas at Austin, I am helping to develop predictive patient-specific technologies that will enable clinicians to evaluate proposed interventions for efficacy and possible side effects associated with altered hemodynamics. Such modeling and simulation tools will also provide detailed information to physicians and biomedical engineers, allowing them to devise new interventions. The use of these tools in the context of patient-specific models will ultimately allow clinicians to craft cardiovascular therapies that are optimized for each individual, with a resulting increase in success and decrease in risk of adverse side effects. In this talk, I will discuss some of the patient-specific technologies we have developed at the Cardiovascular Engineering Group for simulating arterial blood flow and drug delivery systems. These include novel finite element technologies for the coupled fluid-structure interaction problem between blood flow and artery walls, patient-specific NURBS modeling of arteries, and robust simulation techniques for cardiovascular drug delivery. I will focus on some of my own contributions, including the development of new spline discretizations for incompressible flows that are pointwise mass conservative, provably stable and optimally convergent, and geometrically flexible.
