Prototype pediatric-size Mechanical Heart Valves and Compared with Adult-Size Valves

Heart valve defects are the most common congenital cardiovascular anomalies and the most common heart valve defect in children are aortic stenosis, mitral stenosis, or regurgitation. One way to treat this is using mechanical heart valves, which are durable and more favorable in younger patients, but require the patients to take anticoagulation drugs for their whole life. Currently, there is only one pediatric heart valve on the market, and that is a 15 mm mechanical heart valve. In this study, three different mechanical heart valves of different sizes and materials will be run through a mock circulation loop to test hemodynamic performance. The mechanical heart valve sizes will be 30 mm, 23 mm, and 15 mm and be made out of PLA and Resin material. In the mock circulation loop the mechanical heart valves will be evaluated for flow velocity, pressure gradient, and effective orifice area. The primary purpose of this study is to figure out whether scaling down adult sized mechanical heart valves will have similar hemodynamic performance as pediatric sized mechanical heart valves. When printing the mechanical heart. It was found that the PLA mechanical heart valves have smoother leaflet movement compared to the Resin mechanical heart valves. The significance of this study is it will allow for more adult sized mechanical heart valves on the market to be scaled down to pediatric sized mechanical heart valves, which will give more options to pediatric patients.