Fast generation of 3D flow obstacles from parametric surface models: application to cardiac valves

Abstract: Due to the computationally demanding nature of fluid-structure interaction simulations, heart valve simulation is a complex task. A simpler alternative is to model the valve as a resistive flow obstacle that can be updated dynamically without altering the mesh, but this approach can also become computationally expensive for large meshes. In this work, we present a fast method for computing the resistive flow obstacle of a heart valve. The method is based on a parametric surface model of the valve, which is defined by a set of curves. The curves are adaptively sampled to create a polyline representation, which is then used to generate the surface. The surface is represented as a set of points, allowing for efficient distance calculations to determine whether mesh nodes belong to the valve surface. We introduce three algorithms for computing these distances: minimization, sampling, and triangulation. Additionally, we implement two mesh traversal strategies: exhaustive node iteration and recursive neighbor search. The latter significantly reduces the number of distance calculations by only considering neighboring nodes. Our pipeline is demonstrated on both a previously reported aortic valve model and a newly proposed mitral valve model, highlighting its flexibility and efficiency for rapid valve shape updates in computational simulations.