Visualization and simulated surgery of the left ventricle in the virtual pathological heart of the Virtual Physiological Human.

Ischaemic heart failure remains a significant health and economic problem worldwide. This paper presents a user-friendly software system that will form a part of the virtual pathological heart of the Virtual Physiological Human (VPH2) project, currently being developed under the European Commission Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) programme. VPH2 is an integrated medicine project, which will create a suite of modelling, simulation and visualization tools for patient-specific prediction and planning in cases of post-ischaemic left ventricular dysfunction. The work presented here describes a three-dimensional interactive visualization for simulating left ventricle restoration surgery, comprising the operations of cutting, stitching and patching, and for simulating the elastic deformation of the ventricle to its post-operative shape. This will supply the quantitative measurements required for the post-operative prediction tools being developed in parallel in the same project.