Left ventricle diastole

This project was developed in collaboration with a team of cardiologists to help them achieve a simple model of the left ventricle, for early diagnosis of heart malformations and diseases in fetuses. I elaborated this project for my master thesis in Civil Engineering at the University of Padua. I studied the left ventricle (LV) of a heart of a 40 weeks old fetus with the help of the software ABAQUS. The geometry was semplified with the cylinder hemi-ellipsoid "bullet" method. One of the main goals was to recreate the clockwise torsion that occurs during the diastolic phase. In order to do this, I used the consitutive law for anisotropic hyperelastic materials proposed by Holzapfel (already implemented in the software) and I defined a linearly varying orientation of the fibers embedded in the extracellular matrix of the myocardium, from a +60° angle at the endocardium to a -60° angle at the epicardium (angles are defined with respect to the circumferential direction and are positive if counterclokwise). I managed also to reproduce the p-V loop of the LV and it is quite similar to the analytic one.