Heart Valve Biomechanics: The Frontiers of Modeling Modalities and the Expansive Capabilities of Heart Simulation.

The field of heart valve biomechanics is a rapidly expanding, highly clinically relevant area of research. While most valvular pathologies are rooted in biomechanical changes, the technologies for studying these pathologies and identifying treatments have largely been limited. Nonetheless, significant advancements are underway to better understand the biomechanics of heart valves, pathologies, and interventional therapeutics, and these advancements have largely been driven by crucial , and modeling technologies. These modalities represent cutting-edge abilities for generating novel insights regarding native, disease, and repair physiologies, and each has unique advantages and limitations for advancing study in this field. In particular, novel modeling technologies represent an especially promising class of translatable research that leverages the advantages from both and modeling to provide deep quantitative and qualitative insights on valvular biomechanics. The frontiers of this work are being discovered by innovative research groups that have used creative, interdisciplinary approaches toward recapitulating physiology, changing the landscape of clinical understanding and practice for cardiovascular surgery and medicine.