Francesco Bardi, ESR 10 of the MeDiTATe project, published the paper titled A Hybrid Mock Circulatory Loop for Fluid Dynamic Characterization of 3D Anatomical Phantoms in the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering journal.

The work was developed in collaboration with Emanuele Gasparotti, Emanuele Vignali and Simona Celi from Bioengineering Unit (Fondazione Toscana G.Monasterio) and Stéphane Avril from Mines Saint-Étienne.

The paper, whose abstract is reported in the following lines, is available at this link.

This work presents the development of a Hybrid Mock Circulatory Loop (HMCL) to simulate hemodynamics at patient-specific level in terms of both 3D geometry and inlet/outlet boundary conditions. Methods: Clinical data have been processed to define the morphological and functional patient-specific settings. A piston pump is used to impose a parametric flow rate profile at the inlet of the hemodynamic circuit. In order to guarantee the physiological pressure and flow conditions, a specific hybrid chamber system including a real-time control has been designed and implemented. The developed system was validated firstly in a single outlet branch model and, secondly, on a 3D printed patient-specific multi-branch phantom. Finally, for the 3D phantom, the outlet flow profiles were compared with the corresponding in-vivo flow data. Results: Results showed that the root mean squared error between the prescribed setpoint and the measured pressures was always below 3 mmHg (about 2.5%) for all cases. The obtained flow profiles for the patient-specific model were in agreement with the related functional in-vivo data. Significance: The capability to reproduce physiological hemodynamics condition, with high-fidelity, plays a significant role in the cardiovascular research. The developed platform can be used to assess the performances of cardiovascular devices, to validate numerical simulations, and to test imaging systems.