A cardiovascular simulator for medical device testing

Cardiovascular simulators are a class of tools reproducing the human physiology of the cardiovascular system. With the increasing of computer power, simulators improved in the past decades in terms of accuracy and complexity. The use of simulators is currently increasing in the medical fields and is encouraged by the Food and Drug Administration and the European Commission with the Avicenna Alliance. Simulators can be used to test new medical devices in a preclinical phase. They can provide wide ranges of testing conditions to assess the robustness of medical devices. They can offer repeatable testing conditions that help to discover device failure and malfunctioning. In the case of a device for cardiovascular treatment it is fundamental to evaluate how this device interacts with the cardiovascular system. A simulator based on a more detailed physiological model and able to provide realistic pressure and flow waveforms can constitute a further step in this field and an appealing tool for companies to test the complex interaction between their medical device and the cardiovascular system. Besides, it can constitute an
important tool for the improvement of medical device therapies, unravelling complex bodymedical device interactions, helping avoiding device malfunctioning and preventing adverse events.