Hemodynamic Changes in the Right Ventricle Induced by Variations of Cardiac Output: A Possible Mechanism for Arrhythmia Occurrence in the Outflow Tract

The rationale of this paper is to investigate right ventricular (RV) hemodynamics in relation to changes in cardiac output, and in particular to study exercise-induced stresses at the RV outflow tract (RVOT), which is a common site of ventricular arrhythmias in the athlete’s heart. We hypothesize that the thin-walled RVOT is exposed to high wall shear stresses (WSS) during physiological states associated with high cardiac output such as exercise, and therefore, may be particularly prone to substrate formation leading to ventricular tachyarrhythmias. 3D Particle Tracking Velocimetry (3D-PTV), an optical imaging method, has been performed in a novel anatomically accurate compliant silicone right heart model derived from a high resolution MRI heart scan of a healthy male proband. RV and RVOT flow patterns at resting conditions were obtained from two healthy athletic male proband’s hearts and two patients with arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy/dysplasia (ARVC/D) via phase contrast magnetic resonance imaging (PC-MRI). The healthy case was used as a reference for validating the in vitro flow patterns of the silicone model, while the diseased cases were used to generalize our findings and investigate possible changes in hemodynamic stresses with RV morphological remodelling. Our results showed that both healthy and diseased geometries consistently displayed an increased WSS in the RVOT relative to the rest of the RV. We found that increases in cardiac output may lead to increases of mean kinetic energy (MKE), laminar viscous dissipation and WSS at the RVOT. Furthermore, higher peak WSS magnitudes were found for the diseased cases. The identified high WSS regions may correlate with the common site of RVOT ventricular tachycardia in athletes and patients with ARVC/D. Our results imply that exercise, as well as anatomical and functional remodeling might alter RV wall shear stress both in magnitude and spatial distribution, leading to increased hemodynamic stresses in the RVOT.