No Arabic abstract
Two crucial factors for accurate numerical simulations of cardiac electromechanics, which are also essential to reproduce the synchronous activity of the heart, are: i) accounting for the interaction between the heart and the circulatory system that determines pressures and volumes loads in the heart chambers; ii) reconstructing the muscular fiber architecture that drives the electrophysiology signal and the myocardium contraction. In this work, we present a 3D biventricular electromechanical model coupled with a 0D closed-loop model of the whole cardiovascular system that addresses the two former crucial factors. With this aim, we introduce a boundary condition for the mechanical problem that accounts for the neglected part of the domain located on top of the biventricular basal plane and that is consistent with the principles of momentum and energy conservation. We also discuss in detail the coupling conditions that stand behind the 3D and the 0D models. We perform electromechanical simulations in physiological conditions using the 3D-0D model and we show that our results match the experimental data of relevant mechanical biomarkers available in literature. Furthermore, we investigate different arrangements in cross-fibers active contraction. We prove that an active tension along the sheet direction counteracts the myofiber contraction, while the one along the sheet-normal direction enhances the cardiac work. Finally, several myofiber architectures are analysed. We show that a different fiber field in the septal area and in the transmural wall effect the pumping functionality of the left ventricle.
We propose an integrated electromechanical model of the human heart, with focus on the left ventricle, wherein biophysically detailed models describe the different physical phenomena concurring to the cardiac function. We model the subcellular generation of active force by means of an Artificial Neural Network, which is trained by a suitable Machine Learning algorithm from a collection of pre-computed numerical simulations of a biophysically detailed, yet computational demanding, high-fidelity model. To provide physiologically meaningful results, we couple the 3D electromechanical model with a closed-loop 0D (lumped parameters) model describing the blood circulation in the whole cardiovascular network. We prove that the 3D-0D coupling of the two models is compliant with the principle of energy conservation, which is achieved in virtue of energy-consistent boundary conditions that account for the interaction among cardiac chambers within the computational domain, pericardium and surrounding tissue. We thus derive an overall balance of mechanical energy for the 3D-0D model. This provides a quantitative insight into the energy utilization, dissipation and transfer among the different compartments of the cardiovascular network and during different stages of the heartbeat. In virtue of this new model and the energy balance, we propose a new validation tool of heart energy usage against relationships used in the daily clinical practice. Finally, we provide a mathematical formulation of an inverse problem aimed at recovering the reference configuration of one or multiple cardiac chambers, starting from the stressed configuration acquired from medical imaging. This is fundamental to correctly initialize electromechanical simulations. Numerical methods and simulations of the 3D-0D model will be detailed in Part II.
In the framework of accurate and efficient segregated schemes for 3D cardiac electromechanics and 0D cardiovascular models, we propose here a novel numerical approach to address the coupled 3D-0D problem introduced in Part I of this two-part series of papers. We combine implicit-explicit schemes to solve the different cardiac models in a multiphysics setting. We properly separate and manage the different time and space scales related to cardiac electromechanics and blood circulation. We employ a flexible and scalable intergrid transfer operator that enables to interpolate Finite Element functions among different meshes and, possibly, among different Finite Element spaces. We propose a numerical method to couple the 3D electromechanical model and the 0D circulation model in a numerically stable manner within a fully segregated fashion. No adaptations are required through the different phases of the heartbeat. We also propose a robust algorithm to reconstruct the stress-free reference configuration. Due to the computational cost associated with the numerical solution of this inverse problem, the reference configuration recovery algorithm comes along with a novel projection technique to precisely recover the unloaded geometry from a coarser representation of the computational domain. We show the convergence property of our numerical schemes by performing an accuracy study through grid refinement. To prove the biophysical accuracy of our computational model, we also address different scenarios of clinical interest in our numerical simulations by varying preload, afterload and contractility. Indeed, we simulate physiologically relevant behaviors and we reproduce meaningful results in the context of cardiac function.
In silico models of cardiac electromechanics couple together mathematical models describing different physics. One instance is represented by the model describing the generation of active force, coupled with the one of tissue mechanics. For the numerical solution of the coupled model, partitioned schemes, that foresee the sequential solution of the two subproblems, are often used. However, this approach may be unstable. For this reason, the coupled model is commonly solved as a unique system using Newton type algorithms, at the price, however, of high computational costs. In light of this motivation, in this paper we propose a new numerical scheme, that is numerically stable and accurate, yet within a fully partitioned (i.e. segregated) framework. Specifically, we introduce, with respect to standard segregated scheme, a numerically consistent stabilization term, capable of removing the nonphysical oscillations otherwise present in the numerical solution of the commonly used segregated scheme. Our new method is derived moving from a physics-based analysis on the microscale energetics of the force generation dynamics. By considering a model problem of active mechanics we prove that the proposed scheme is unconditionally absolutely stable (i.e. it is stable for any time step size), unlike the standard segregated scheme, and we also provide an interpretation of the scheme as a fractional step method. We show, by means of several numerical tests, that the proposed stabilization term successfully removes the nonphysical numerical oscillations characterizing the non stabilized segregated scheme solution. Our numerical tests are carried out for several force generation models available in the literature, namely the Niederer-Hunter-Smith model, the model by Land and coworkers, and the mean-field force generation model that we have recently proposed. Finally, we apply the proposed scheme [...]
In this paper we present a numerical discretization of the coupled elasto-acoustic wave propagation problem based on a Discontinuous Galerkin Spectral Element (DGSE) approach in a three-dimensional setting. The unknowns of the coupled problem are the displacement field and the velocity potential, in the elastic and the acoustic domains, respectively, thereby resulting in a symmetric formulation. After stating the main theoretical results, we assess the performance of the method by convergence tests carried out on both matching and non-matching grids, and we simulate realistic scenarios where elasto-acoustic coupling occurs. In particular, we consider the case of Scholte waves and the scattering of elastic waves by an underground acoustic cavity. Numerical simulations are carried out by means of the code SPEED, available at http://speed.mox.polimi.it.
In this paper, we develop two parameter-robust numerical algorithms for Biot model and applied the algorithms in brain edema simulations. By introducing an intermediate variable, we derive a multiphysics reformulation of the Biot model. Based on the reformulation, the Biot model is viewed as a generalized Stokes subproblem combining with a reaction-diffusion subproblem. Solving the two subproblems together or separately will lead to a coupled or a decoupled algorithm. We conduct extensive numerical experiments to show that the two algorithms are robust with respect to the physics parameters. The algorithms are applied to study the brain swelling caused by abnormal accumulation of cerebrospinal fluid in injured areas. The effects of key physics parameters on brain swelling are carefully investigated. It is observe that the permeability has the greatest effect on intracranial pressure (ICP) and tissue deformation; the Youngs modulus and the Poisson ratio will not affect the maximum ICP too much but will affect the tissue deformation and the developing speed of brain swelling.