Next-generation in-silico Cardiac Electrophysiology through Immersed Grid Meshfree Modelling: Application to Simulation of Myocardial Infarction

Abstract

State-of-art simulators of cardiac tissue electrophysiology are commonly based on the Finite Element Method (FEM). FEM is known to be a robust and accurate numerical method, but its accuracy highly depends on the quality of the mesh. Generating a good-quality mesh may be cumbersome and time consuming for models with complex geometries, such as those representing the anatomy of human organs. This limitation restricts the clinical application of FEM. To overcome this challenge, we propose the use of a meshfree method, the Moving Kriging Mixed Collocation (MKMC) method for in silico cardiac electrophysiology. MKMC is a purely meshfree method requiring the definition of a point cloud rather than a mesh. We propose the construction of the point cloud as an immersed grid of points generated automatically from image data. In simulations on a swine biventricular model, both under baseline and myocardial infarction conditions, we demonstrate the capability of the MKMC method to generate results in very good agreement with FEM while alleviating the mesh requirement. Differences in local activation time and action potential duration between MKMC and FEM are in mean below 3%. The proposed MKMC method represents a promising alternative to FEM for cardiac in silico investigations with the potential to be integrated in the clinic.

Steady-state and transient effects of SK channel block and adrenergic stimulation to counteract acetylcholine-induced arrhythmogenic effects in the human atria: A computational study

“…The cellular simulations were performed using MATLAB, while tissue simulations were performed using ELECTRA, an in-house software that implements the Finite Element Method (FEM) and Meshfree Methods for the solution of the monodomain model [33][34][35]. In this work, FEM was used.…”

Cardiac Electrophysiology Meshfree Modeling through the Mixed Collocation Method

“…In this section, we simulate electrical propagation in the biventricular geometry using the same protocol as in Section 3.4. However, we perform the simulation with the MCM considering an immersed grid nodal distribution [41]. The immersed grid (70,027 nodes) was generated automatically by assigning field nodes at the center of the DW-MRI voxels.…”

A dual adaptive explicit time integration algorithm for efficiently solving the cardiac monodomain equation

“…Simulations were performed using a multithreaded implementation of the Finite Element Method using ELECTRA, an in-house software implementing the Finite Element Method and the Meshfree Mixed Collocation method [11][12][13] for solving the monodomain model. In this work, we used the Finite Element implementation.…”