High Performance Computing for Cognition-Guided Cardiac Surgery: Soft Tissue Simulation for Mitral Valve Reconstruction in Knowledge-Based Surgery Assistance

Medical simulations play an increasingly important role in today’s clinical and surgical treatment processes. The scope of this work is the support of the surgical operation of a mitral valve reconstruction (MVR) by means of biomechanical simulations. Based on numerical simulation, the natural anatomical setting, the ring implantation and the valve closure are modelled and efficiently computed in order to provide surgeons during the operation with additional morphological and functional information. Our simulation is based on the Finite Element Method (FEM) and implemented using the open-source C++ FEM software HiFlow³. Integrating patient data and surgical expert knowledge, and making efficient use of High-Performance Computing (HPC) methods allows for obtaining valuable simulation results for surgery assistance in adequate times. In this work, we focus on the intelligent setup of the biomechanical model and the flexible interfaces of the HPC-based implementation of the resulting MVR simulation, thereby aiming at a cognition-guided, patient-specific integration into systems for surgery assistance.