Development and Validation of a Magneto-hydrodynamic Solver for Blood Flow Analysis

Wolfgang Kainz, Joshua W. Guag, Stefan Benkler, Dominik Szczerba, Esra Neufeld, Victor Krauthamer, Joel Myklebust, Howard I. Bassen, Isaac A Chang, Nicolas Chavannes, Jung Hwan Kim, Malisa Sarntinoranont, and Niels Kuster, in Physics in Medicine and Biology, Volume 55, Issue 23, pp. 7253–7261, December 2010, online November 16

This study aimed to develop a numerical solver to calculate the magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) signal produced by blood flow in the great vessels of the heart in a static magnetic field. This MHD signal is able to non-invasively characterize cardiac blood flow in order to supplement the present non-invasive techniques for the assessment of heart failure conditions. To characterize and eventually optimize MHD measurements, we developed a MHD solver based on a finite element code. This code was validated against literature, experimental and analytical data, and shows good agreement with all three reference values.

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