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The diagnostic capabilities, palliative procedures, and critical care therapies for neonates with single ventricle heart disease have rapidly evolved. We aimed to review current trends for intensivists and cardiologists caring for this population. Enhanced diagnostics and 3-dimensional modeling can be instrumental in planning care pathways for these neonates. Additionally, the ability to palliate many of these patients with catheter-based therapies rather than traditional surgical approaches has allowed for reduced morbidity. There are significant improvements in the understanding of how critical care therapies affect survival and neurodevelopmental outcomes in this population. Despite advancements in the understanding of longer-term outcomes in this population, much remains to be discovered about how initial palliation, critical care strategies, surgical techniques, and extracorporeal support can be optimized for the most favorable neurodevelopmental outcomes, survival, and quality of life. This will be the major focus of future research through larger collaboratives.

Taking into account arbitrary crack geometries, crack closure generally occurs independently of the load case. As the standard eXtended Finite Element Method (XFEM) does not prevent unphysical crack face penetration in this case, a formulation allowing for crack face contact is proposed in terms of a penalty formulation for normal contact. The discretization is developed for non-planar cracks intersecting hexahedral elements in an arbitrary manner. Typical problems of many crack face contact implementations within the XFEM, like locking or the introduction of additional degrees of freedom, are avoided by projecting the contact contribution onto the hexahedral element nodes. The method is tested by means of suitable numerical examples, finally presenting an application in form of a multiscale setup with arbitrarily arranged micro cracks in the vicinity of a macro crack front.