Ascending Thoracic Aortic Aneurysm and Dissection Approximately 30,000 people in the US are diagnosed with thoracic aortic aneurysms every year. Patients that experience the devastating event of rupture or dissection face up to 60% mortality.Currently, aTAA elective surgical repair is ...  Read More

Computational Simulation of Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement (TAVR) Aortic stenosis (AS) is the most common heart valve disease encountered in the elderly. The aortic valve leaflets become restricted due to excessive calcium buildup. In the past, surgical aortic valve replacement ...  Read More

Passive Constraint The Acorn CorCap TM Cardiac Support Device (CSD) (Acorn Cardiovascular, Inc., St.Paul, MN) is a bidirectional woven polyester yarn jacket placed over the left (LV) and right ventricles (RV) in patients with dilated cardiomyopathy and heart failure. The ...  Read More

The Ross Procedure and Pulmonary Autograft Biomechanics For the pediatric and adolescent patients diagnosed with aortic valve disease, a major challenge is determining the optimal surgical treatment. Bioprosthetic tissue valves degenerate over several years, while mechanical valves necessitate anticoagulation. Both ...  Read More

Transcatheter Aortic Valves Aortic stenosis (AS), due to accumulation of calcium in the valve leaflets, is a major heart valve disease encountered in the elderly. Surgical aortic valve replacement (AVR) is still the gold standard to treat patients with severe ...  Read More

Borderzone Dysfunction It has been known since the mid 1980s that systolic performance (systolic shortening and wall thickening) is depressed in the non-ischemic borderzone (BZ) after antero-apical myocardial infarction (MI). It was initially thought that the reduced BZ function was ...  Read More

Ischemic Mitral Regurgitation Ischemic mitral regurgitation (MR) affects 1.2 to 2.1 million patients in the United States, with more than 400,000 patients having moderate-to-severe MR. Chronic ischemic MR of 2+ severity discovered at cardiac catheterization for symptomatic coronary artery disease ...  Read More

Surgical Ventricular Remodeling Initially described by Dor in 1989, endoventricular patch plasty (Dor procedure) is used to reduce left ventricular (LV) volume after myocardial infarction (MI) and subsequent LV remodeling. Briefly, the infarct is incised and a purse-string suture (Fontan ...  Read More

Bi-axial Stretching Apparatus We utilize a custom made biaxial stretcher to determine the biaxial stiffness of certain biologic [Gundiah et al, J Mech Behav Biomed Mater, 2: 288, 2009] and device related materials [Gundiah et al, Ann Thorac Surg, 85 ...  Read More

Finite Element Models a. Left Ventricular (LV) Model FE models of the LV that incorporate myocardial contractility have been described and used to determine the effect of myocardial infarction on structure and function. We believe that large deformation finite element ...  Read More

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) Our experimental method is cardiac MR imaging with tags. MR images are contoured and used as the basis for finite element models. In addition, 3D strain is calculated from the tag lines. 3D myocardial strain before ...  Read More