Characterization of Left Ventricular Hemodynamics in a Pulse Duplicator through Phase Plane Analysis

Abstract

In vitro simulators give the chance to mimic specific human physiological/unphysiological conditions to test medical devices, accelerating innovation cycles, and rapidly exploring new effective solutions. Specifically, in this work, we consider a Pulse Duplicator in use at the Healing Research Laboratory, at the University of Padova, Italy. It allows assessing the performance of prosthetic heart valves under simulated cardiac conditions by generating a controlled pulsatile flow obtained by setting specific system characteristics such as the peripheral resistance and the compliance. In order to conduct effective prosthetic heart valve tests, the Pulse Duplicator has to be manually tuned to provide suitable hemodynamics waveforms (i.e. flow and pressure waves). To assist this time-consuming and not trivial task, we present a Phase Plane Analysis of a particular signal (i.e., the left ventricular pressure) in order to capture additional hemodynamic characteristics of clinical interest that can serve system tuning purposes.