Modern surgical treatment of arterial disease is moving towards minimally invasive procedures, as the benefits are numerous. However, one area that is resisting this trend is the treatment of carotid artery disease. For the past number of decades carotid endarterectomy surgery has been referred to as the “gold standard” in the treatment of carotid artery disease. However, in recent year’s carotid angioplasty and stenting (CAS) has emerged to challenge carotid endarterectomy surgery (CES) as a viable alternative for the prevention of strokes. However uptake of this procedure has been hindered due to the peri-operative complications associated with the treatment. During this procedure blood flow in one of the internal carotid arteries supplying blood to the brain is interrupted for a period of time. However, it has been shown that not all patients can accommodate this interruption. Qureshi et al. suggests that ischemic neurological deficits occur in 3 to 13% of patients as a result of hemodynamic compromise.

Thoracic aortic stent grafts (TASG) are commonly used to repair aortic anomalies or diseases in a minimally-invasive fashion. One complication of TASG is collapse, whereby blood is unable to completely flow through the graft as intended. Most TASG collapses occur in the setting of endovascular repair of traumatic thoracic aortic transection, where a typically smaller diameter aorta of pediatric patients is repaired with a relatively larger diameter endograft designed to treat aneurysmal disease [1]. It is hypothesized that the poor apposition of the leading edge of the proximal stent graft to the lesser curvature of the aortic arch can result increased hemodynamic force at the leading side of the graft can reach sufficient magnitude to cause collapse and gradual occlusion of the tubular graft. The incidence rates of stent graft collapse in endovascular aortic transection repairs have been reported to range from 0.03% to 10% [2].

A numerical simulation of pulsatile flow through a bileaflet mechanical heart valve is presented using smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), a meshfree particle method. In SPH, the flow is modeled using fluid particles moving within the domain in which there is no mesh generation process and the conservation of mass is satisfied automatically. SPH showed a good capability to capture the main hemodynamic trend. The particle based nature of SPH allows also blood particle tracking, an important component in order to analysis the level of hemolysis induced by bileaflet mechanical heart valves.

The lymphatic system plays a vital role in maintaining proper physiological function in the body. Its removal of proteins and other particulate matter from the tissue spaces is particularly important for the body’s prevention of extracellular edema [1]. After fluid is absorbed by the initial lymphatics, it is transported to lymph nodes where filtration occurs. In addition, the lymphatic system serves as a common pathway of initial metastases to regional lymph nodes for certain types of cancers [2]. Thus, the characterization of mass transport in the lymphatic system could lead to unprecedented insight into the treatment of such pathologies.

To evaluate the qualitative impact and computational accuracy of pulsatile flow through the total cavopulmonary connection (TCPC), multiple patient-specific models were studied using computational, experimental, and imaging techniques and the multi-modality results compared. Agreement with regard to both qualitative behavior and quantitative velocity measures was very convincing, which robustly demonstrates the precision of our various investigational methods.