DescriptionThe heart has long been seen as a symbol of life, due to its critical function of pumping blood throughout the body. However, despite its importance, we still do not fully understand how the heart works, due to its complex motion and structure. In particular, doctors today are very interested in learning how the heart geometry may affect cardiac blood flow. However, current imaging techniques, such as MRI or Ultrasound, provide only low-resolution views of blood flow, which do not provide the desired level of detail. In this dissertation, We will be presenting how we are using images from high-resolution CT scans to build accurate, animated 3D models of a patient's heart, which are then used as boundary conditions in solving the Navier-Stokes equations to simulate ventricular blood flow. This way, we can visualize how the complex structures within the heart interact with the flow in both healthy and diseased hearts, which has never been seen before. We can also use similar simulation techniques with high-detail aortic valve reconstructions, to better understand how diseased-induced alterations in the blood flow pattern may promote chronic remodeling of the aortic root. Finally, we have modified the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics algorithm to allow for fast and effective boundary collision management to greatly speed up our simulations.