Measurement of tissue and hemodynamic wave phenomena in cardiac function

由于正常心脏功能的复杂性以及难以获得足以真实描述功能的高质量体内数据，因此从工程角度来看，心脏力学和血流的研究具有挑战性。毫不奇怪，我们的心脏如何工作的基本方面仍然没有描述。特别感兴趣的是在拟议的计划是心脏功能的“波”的重要性，无论是在心肌中的机械波和在血液中旅行的压力波。 波通常在血管中观察到，例如，引起通常在手腕处测量的脉搏，但是波在心脏中的表现还不清楚。 我们建议，心脏功能本身的基本方面不能准确地描述没有波的描述，这将代表在目前的心脏生物力学描述的转变。 将采集和处理高时间和高空间分辨率成像数据（来自磁共振成像），以评估心脏中随时间和空间的肌肉应变模式，这是研究肌肉内波传播所必需的。 心脏血池内的类似测量将用于显示心脏的波浪状运动如何在血液中产生可比较的波形，最终驱动我们身体所依赖的血流。 这项工作的长期目标是开发工具来研究心脏和血液运动，并描述工作心脏的现实机械和流体动力学，这最终是了解心脏的许多疾病中的正常功能和异常功能所必需的。

The study of the cardiac mechanics and blood flow is challenging from an engineering perspective due to the complexity of normal heart function and the difficulty in acquiring high quality in-vivo data that is sufficient for realistic descriptions of function. Not surprisingly there remain fundamental aspects of how our heart works that are not described. Of particular interest in the proposed program is the importance of "waves" in heart function, both mechanical waves in the heart muscle and pressure waves that travel in the blood. Waves are commonly observed in the blood vessels, giving rise to the pulse commonly measured at ones wrist, for example, but the manifestation of waves in the heart is not well understood. We propose that fundamental aspects of heart function itself cannot be accurately described without a wave description, which would represent a shift in the current biomechanical descriptions of the heart. High temporal and high spatial resolution imaging data (from magnetic resonance imaging) will be acquired and processed to evaluate the patterns of muscle strain over time and space in the heart that are necessary to study the propagation of waves within the muscle. Similar measurements within the blood pool in the heart will be used to show how wave-like motion of the heart gives rise to comparable wave patterns in the blood which ultimately drive the blood flow that our bodies depend upon. The long term goals of this work are to develop tools to study heart and blood motion and to describe the realistic mechanical and fluid dynamics of the working heart, which ultimately are necessary to understand both normal function and abnormal function in the many diseases of the heart.