Special Seminar: “Towards Blood Damage Free Left Ventricular Assist Devices”

Abstract:

Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide and in the United States. While a heart transplant is the only effective treatment when heart failure reaches the end stage, it is severely limited by the number of available donors. Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD), a tiny implantable blood pump, has been developed to address this urgent need for alternative therapeutic options. However, the complex flow field generated by the fast-spinning rotor causes damage to the blood and has been associated with severe complications, including bleeding, thrombosis, infection, and stroke. Understanding the interactions between blood cells and the flow within LVADs is crucial to reducing blood damage and enabling long-term support. In this seminar, we will discuss the challenges, advancements, and future prospects of developing LVADs that cause minimal blood damage. We will start by talking about the complex flow structures in large and small turbomachines and the development of novel imaging techniques to study them. In the second part, we will look at the current progress on quantifying blood damage using advanced 3D time resolved particle tracking. In the last part, we will examine the computational modeling challenges for complex turbulence and blood damage in LVADs. Through these examples, I will conclude with a clear roadmap that will lead to a giant leap forward in our understanding of blood-flow interactions and a possible blood damage free LVAD.

Bio:

Dr. Huang Chen is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his BS and MS degrees from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2010 and 2013, and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2019. His PhD research was focused on the complex flow and turbulence in the tip region of axial turbomachines and how to use casing treatment to control them. He also studied cavitation phenomena in a waterjet pump. At Georgia Tech, he studies the flow in the cardiovascular system and focuses on flow past prosthetic heart valves and in left ventricular assist devices. He also works on patient-specific surgical planning for heart valve implantation procedures and congenital heart disease. His broad research interests revolve around developing advanced optical measurement techniques to study complex flows and turbulence in turbomachines and blood contacting medical devices. He is also interested in applying novel flow control methods to reduce blood damage and developing data-driven computational models based on high-resolution experimental data.