Engineering Power – Vol. 12 (3) 2017

21 Oct Engineering Power – Vol. 12 (3) 2017

Croatian Academy of Engineering (HATZ)
2017

Vol. 12(3) 2017 – 20 pages – English

Biomedical engineering is one of the fastest developing fields, which touches many specialties and provides a basis for the faster development of medical science. Close and fruitful cooperation of medical doctors and engineers results in team synergy, thus enabling faster progress than in the case when everyone works separately in their own “silos”. At the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture we recognized the necessity of such cooperation mora than ten years ago. Today, our several engineer teams are t5eamed up with medical doctors in projects related to medicine. As pathological conditions in the cardiovascular system (such as atherosclerosis, formation of aneurysms, valvular heart diseases, ect.) are strongly interlinked with the hemodynamics of the cardiovascular system and tissue remodelling, they attract of our departments. The Department of Fluid Mechanics is now in charge of hemodynamics and the Department of Mechanics is in charge of tissue remodelling and formation of aneurysms. The papers below provide the Department of Fluid Mechanics team with a short overview over research activities and results in the field of hemodynamic modelling of the cardiovascular system. we have developed models and numerical methods with different levels of complexity: from a lumped parameter model to one-dimensional and quasi two-dimensional model. The simplest lumped parameter model is important for clinicials, since it describes the principal part of the cardiovascular systems with a relatively small number of parameters, each having a clear physiological meaning crucial to understand the system function. Such a model is being applied in an ongoing project considering non-invasive method for the model parameter identification of pulmonary circulation in subjects with pulmonary hypertension. The problem with one-dimensional and three-dimensional models is that they require more input data (e.g. space variation of blood vessel diameter and wall properties) that cannot be easily measured, but still such models are very important for understanding wave phenomena in the arterial tree and for estimating the local flow parameters, important for the prediction of some diseases (such as aneurysm growth). The developed models and methods are a good basis for prospective cooperation with the University of Zagreb, School of Medicine with purpose of collaborative research on artificial heart development and education of prospective medical engineering students.

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