Control system design for the mock ventricle with aortic and mitral valve resistance uncertainty

Abstract

Reproducing the native left ventricle’s contractile behavior is the key ingredient for the mock cardiovascular circulatory system. It can be achieved by controlling either mock ventricle’s pressure or volume so that it could follow the reference signal calculated by the Elastance waveform. However, due to inherent uncertainties of the parameter values of the mock ventricle, such as check valve resistance, it is difficult to achieve high quality control performance. In this paper, we present an adaptive control scheme to overcome this parameter value uncertainty and to achieve high quality control performance. To the best knowledge of the author, it is the first report that reproduces the mock ventricle pumping dynamics precisely considering the resistance of the aortic/mitral check valves and overcoming the uncertainty of them. In the paper, along with the detailed design of the controller, rigorous proof of the stability and the convergence is presented as well. Computer simulation was performed using an electrical-analog cardiovascular circulatory system model and a piston pump mock ventricle model. Results confirmed that adaptive control achieved almost perfect tracking performance in spite of large parameter uncertainty and high bandwidth dynamic characteristics of the mock ventricle. Performance comparison verified the superiority of the adaptive controller over PID controllers.