Influence of the aortic valve leaflets on the fluid-dynamics in aorta in presente of a normally functioning bicuspid valve

In this work we consider the blood fluid-dynamics in the ascending aorta in presence of a normally functioning bicuspid aortic valve (BAV). In particular, we perform a computational study to assess the effect of the inclusion of the leaflets on the fluid-dynamic abnormalities characterizing BAV cases. Indeed, in previous works it has been shown that without leaflets it is possible to recover such abnormalities, in particular the strong systolic jet asymmetry, but it was not clear how the inclusion of the leaflets would have improve the results. To this aim we perform a comparison in two real geometries (a dilated and a non-dilated ones) among three scenarios which are built up for each geometry: BAV without leaflets, BAV with leaflets, and tricuspid case (TAV) with leaflets. Our results show that the inclusion of the leaflets increases the fluid-dynamics abnormalities which are quantified through the introduction of suitable synthetic indices.