Levels of Hemolysis

NIH for VADS

  NIH   ||    Clinical Outcomes
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  >0.06   ||    Increased levels of PfHb
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  >0.04   ||    No increase of PfHb but blood transfusion required
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  <0.04   ||    Physiologically acceptable --------------------------------------------------------------
  <0.02   ||    Clinically acceptable
  <0.01   ||    Design objective
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This is taken from "Design and development strategy for the Rotary blood pumps," Artificial Organs, 1998, 22(6):438 [also see -- ASTM F1841-97/F1830-97]

Normalized Index of Hemolysis

Normalized Index of Hemolysis (NIH) is the clinical measure of hemolysis as per the ASTM standards.
NIH (g/100L) = \delta_PfHb x V x [ (100-Hct)/Hct ] x [ 100 / (Q x T) ]
where:
a.   \delta_PfHb = increase in plasma free hemoglobin concentraion (g/L)
b.   V = volume of blood in mock loop circuit (L)
c.   Hct = hematocrit
d.   Q = flow rate (L/min)
e.   T = Time (min)
NIH can be stated as:
Amount of PfHb released per pass of blood volume through the blood pump.
The hemolysis ratio which is more commonly used in the simple shear hemolysis experiments can be converted to NIH as:
NIH (g/100L) = 100 x [\delta_Hb / Hb] x [1 - Hct/100] x k where:
a.   [\delta_Hb / Hb] = hemolysis ratio
b.   Hct = hematocrit
c.   k = hemoglobin content of blood (150g/L) for healthy person

Blood at non-Newtonian workshop !!

I was attending the 14th International Workshop on Numerical Methods for non-Newtonian Flows at Santa-Fe, New Mexico. And, an important point of discussion in this workshop was that the numerical methods should be used for bio-fluid analysis.
Robert Owens, who is a professor of at the "Largest" French university in North-America, presented a new constitutive model for blood flow based on sticky-dumbells. This work seems to be an improvement on the previously proposed generalized-Newtonian (shear-thinning) Oldroyd-B type model proposed by Anand and Rajagopal (Anand2004a). The models has a closed form constitutive equations which needs to be tested for the extremities in a 3D blood flow simulations.
Further, there were some people interested in turbulence modeling for the blood and other bio-fluids.
Prof. Marek Behr presented the Galerkin Least Squares methods for the viscoelastic fluids, which is under development for high performance computing of bio-fluid and other viscoelastic fluids.

Thrombosis_1

Chen96a: The effect of shear rate on the rouleaux size and blood viscosity was studied analytically. But, the problem is a coupled one as the shear rate is in turn affected by viscosity variation. In any case the paper has a neat idea and can be applied for the thrombosis determination.