kgcamero@ualberta.ca
Graduate
BEng in Mechanical Engineering (2014)
Ex Vivo Heart Perfusion

Research Interests: Cardiovascular fluid mechanics, PIV

In North America, only 36-39% of available donor hearts are successfully transplanted; the rest are discarded. This is often attributed to the narrow six hour time window currently available for transplantation and the fact that many donated organs are rendered unusable due to cell damage incurred upon donation. This is most often the case with donations after circulatory death (DCD) donors. A method called ex vivo heart perfusion (EVHP) enables the use of such damaged donor hearts by preserving the heart's beating function outside the body from the time of donation until transplantation. In their beating states, hearts can be resuscitated, preserved and monitored and time windows available for transplantation can be significantly extended which ultimately expands the donor pool. To date, research efforts have been directed towards understanding the metabolic environment required to sustain cardiac performance in the EVHP system but there is now interest in understanding the effect of fluid dynamics on system performance. The region of most interest is the left flow loop which mimics an in vivo flow region that is characterised by the presence of a highly compliant aorta and significant unsteady effects. This project has undertaken the development of a mechanical flow loop analogous to the left side of the EVHP system in order to test this flow region. In particular, this work is concerned with the effect of compliance on downstream velocity fields and overall system performance under both Newtonian and non-Newtonian regimes. Pulsatile aortic flow is simulated using a commercial left ventricular assist device (LVAD) and time-resolved particle imaging velocimetry (PIV) is used to obtain visualisations of the flow fields downstream of the compliant section.