Blood flow through a defective bileaflet mechanical
heart valve was modeled using steady and pulsatile
blood flow conditions under several flow and
malfunction severity conditions. The calculations
used Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations with
Newtonian blood properties. The results showed that
the flow upstream and downstream of the defective
valve is highly influenced by malfunction severity
and this resulted in a misleading improvement in the
correlation between simulated Doppler
echocardiographic and catheter transvalvular pressure
gradients. In this study, two potential...