Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.
Med Biol Eng Comput. 2014 Jan;52(1):1-8. doi: 10.1007/s11517-013-1113-y. Epub 2013 Sep 14.
Calcific aortic valve disease is the most common heart valve disease. It is associated with a significant increase in cardiovascular morbidity and mortality and independently increases the cardiovascular risk. It is then important to develop parameters that can estimate the stiffness of the valve. Such parameters may contribute to early detection of the disease or track its progression and optimize the timing for therapy. In this study, we introduce a metric representing the stiffness of the native aortic calcified valve over a wide range of stenosis severities. Our approach is based on three-dimensional structural finite-element simulations and in vitro measurements. The proposed method is developed first in a pulse duplicator; its clinical applicability is then evaluated in three patients with severe aortic stenosis. Our results indicate that the value of the proposed metric varies considerably between healthy valves and valves with very severe aortic stenosis, from 0.001 to 7.38 MPa, respectively. The method introduced in this study could give useful information regarding the stiffness of the valve leaflets with potential application to the evaluation of aortic sclerosis and aortic stenosis.
钙化性主动脉瓣疾病是最常见的心脏瓣膜病。它与心血管发病率和死亡率的显著增加有关，并独立增加心血管风险。因此，开发能够估计瓣膜硬度的参数非常重要。这些参数可能有助于早期发现疾病，或跟踪其进展，优化治疗时机。在这项研究中，我们引入了一个代表在广泛狭窄严重程度下天然钙化主动脉瓣硬度的指标。我们的方法基于三维结构有限元模拟和体外测量。该方法首先在脉动复制器中开发，然后在三名严重主动脉瓣狭窄的患者中评估其临床适用性。我们的结果表明，在所研究的方法中，在健康瓣膜和严重主动脉瓣狭窄的瓣膜之间，所提出的指标值差异很大，分别为 0.001 至 7.38 MPa。本研究中引入的方法可以提供有关瓣膜小叶硬度的有用信息，可能适用于主动脉硬化和主动脉瓣狭窄的评估。
