SUMMARY

The proposed work focuses on the ties between Fontan connection hemodynamics and patient outcomes. Two thousand children suffer from congenital heart diseases each year and the surgical palliation for sufferers of single ventricle congenital heart diseases results in a fundamentally different circulatory system. Thus far, in vitro attempts to understand these differences and the hemodynamic ties to patient outcomes have lacked some physiological accuracy. The proposed work aims to understand the effect of respiration, pulsatility, and exercise condition on Fontan connection hemodynamics through development and validation of a comprehensive Fontan mock circulation and parametric sweeps of applicable respiration, pulsatility, and exercise condition values. The work will answer the central hypothesis through comparisons of control volume and detailed (PIV) hemodynamic results to patient clinical outcomes as well as previous studies from literature. The proposed work will result in the most comprehensive, validated in vitro Fontan mock circulation to date, an increased understanding of Fontan hemodynamics and physiology, and experimental data sets for computational fluid dynamics simulation validation.