Heart valves (HVs) are fluidic control components of the heart that ensure unidirectional
blood flow during the cardiac cycle. However, this description does not adequately describe …

Due to the increasing number of heart valve diseases, there is an urgent clinical need for off-
the-shelf tissue engineered heart valves. While significant progress has been made toward …

Heart valves are characterized to be highly flexible yet tough, and exhibit complex
deformation characteristics such as nonlinearity, anisotropy, and viscoelasticity, which are …

Understanding the viscoelastic behavior of collagenous tissues with complex hierarchical
structures requires knowledge of the properties at each structural level. Whole tissues have …

Synthetic implants made by traditional fabrication routes are not patient specific and rarely
match the performance of their biological counterparts. We present an additive …

The native human heart valve leaflet contains a layered microstructure comprising a
hierarchical arrangement of collagen, elastin, proteoglycans and various cell types. Here …

Calcific aortic valve disease (CAVD) is a major contributor to cardiovascular morbidity and
mortality and, given its association with age, the prevalence of CAVD is expected to continue …

Calcific aortic valve disease (CAVD), once thought to be a degenerative disease, is now
recognized to be an active pathobiological process, with chronic inflammation emerging as …

The immersed boundary method is both a general mathematical framework and a particular
numerical approach to problems of fluid-structure interaction. In the present work, we …

The aortic valve lies in a unique hemodynamic environment, one characterized by a range
of stresses (shear stress, bending forces, loading forces and strain) that vary in intensity and …