• Mock cardiac pump

My work has been developed in cooperation with BioCardioLab at "Fondazione Toscana Gabriele Monasterio" and the Institute of Cardiovascular Science at University College of London (UCL). The goal of this project is the development of a novel pump suitable for cardiovascular mock circuit which is: anatomically realistic, able to mimic the left ventricle dynamics, and magnetic resonance (MR) compatible.
The pump makes possible to replicate the heart beat which causes the ejection of blood through the aorta. Commonly, the pumps which are currently available are very complex mechanisms which makes it complicated using them in a clinical environment. For example, the presence of many metallic components make cardiac pump incompatible with the magnetic resonance (MR) environment. My work of thesis starts from the requirement of designing a cardiovascular pump which could be potentially used to either support cardiac functions or testing realistically medical devices. I deal with this challenge by means of numerical and experimental techniques.
The work is structured in the following parts:
• segmentation of a patient specific left ventricle in all phases of cardiac cycle from cardiac magnetic resonance images in order to isolate the anatomic part;
• development of different CAD models of the pumps from the left ventricle reconstruction;
• Finite elements simulation;
• Experiments of a rapid prototyped model of the newly designed cardiac pump.