Cardiovascular Simulation as a Decision Support Tool

The variable presentation of clinical disease in pediatric patients with congenital and acquired heart disease makes standardized care challenging. This is further enforced by the ongoing growth and remodeling of the heart and vasculature in the individual child and the multitude of available treatment options. The clinical challenge is rather to individualize treatment based on all available information. One option toward individualization of treatment is to use all available information as an input for clinical modeling. Simulation is not able to handle all the complexities in these clinical cases but may be useful in helping to handle the load of information and even look for missing information when analyzing the disease state and the effect of different treatment options in detail. We believe that a synthesis between clinical experience, available scientifical evidence from clinical studies, and predictions from simulations will improve decision making in future pediatric cardiology.