This presentation was made by Sinan Soganci at the NAFEMS eSeminar "Simulation & Digital Twins - Behind the Buzzwords" on the 2nd of May 2018.

Digital twins are referring to the digital replica of different concepts such as products, systems or processes in different industries. Recently, this concept has also being aforementioned for modelling and simulation of human body parts and organs, already being considered as a crucial bio-technological aspect of close future. In this respect; virtual modeling and analysis of a representative beating human heart, patient specific heart modeling or digital prototypes of the heart devices are of the main research interests of an interdisciplinary community of cardiologists, surgeons, engineers, and physicians.

In the scope of cardiovascular simulations; patient specific (or normalized among a group of patients) medical imaging based CFD simulations and coupled multiphysics FSI simulations are the main approaches for generating the simulation frameworks moving forward in the road to ultimate digital twins of the human heart.

This presentation is intended to give insights about various processes that leads to higher fidelity digital representations in the scope of cardiovascular simulations, including below:-CFD model generation based on CT scans. -Non-invasive digital angiography & FFRCT (Fractional Flow Reserve). -Post-TAVI coronary flow. -Blood flow in SIMULIA LHHM (Living Heart Human Model) with mechanical valves. -Transcatheter tissue engineered aortic valve FSI simulation. -Evolut R stent deployment in LHHM. -Mitral Valve and Mitral Clip FSI simulation

Investigation of blood flow and tissue mechanics in a living human heart is a strong fluid-structure interaction (FSI) phenomenon which, in the given case studies, has been addressed by means of one or two-way coupling approaches between Abaqus FEA and FlowVision CFD software, also in some cases accompanied by SIMULIA LHHM. In such framework; Abaqus is utilized for calculating heart motions and deformations whereas FlowVision is responsible from modelling the viscous blood flow and LHHM serves as a dynamic, anatomically realistic, 4-chamber heart model having 2 mechanical valves coupling the electrical and mechanical fields.