Progress towards an electromechanical model of the heart for cardiac image analysis

Abstract

We present a 3D numerical model of the heart ventricles which couples electrical and biomechanical activities. We have adopted a simpler formulation of previously published models to achieve a trade-off between biological accuracy and computational efficiency. To carry out computations, the FitzHugh-Nagumo equations are solved along with a constitutive law based on the Hill-Maxwell rheological law. Ultimately, the parameters of this generic model will be adjusted from the actual patient's ECG and from the cardiac motion measured in 4D cardiac images. By including biological and physical a priori knowledge, we expect to extract quantitative ventricular function parameters from time sequences of cardiac images 1 .

Stability and convergence of a finite volume method for two systems of reaction-diffusion equations in electro-cardiology

“…For, it is adapted from the original model of Hodkin-Huxley [11], it suits the behaviour of a nerve axon. For the myocardial cells, a simplified model was proposed by Aliev and Panfilov [18] and has been widely used in 3D simulations of the human ventricles [17,21]. It writes…”

“…Although the approach would be the same for complex ones, this paper only treats the case of two simplified two variables models, namely the well-known FitzHugh-Nagumo one [6] and the one from Aliev-Panfilov [18]. The latter is very well suited to the myocardial cell, and often used in practical computer models [17,21,22].…”

Tagged magnetic resonance imaging of the heart: a survey

“…When both the boundaries and the tag lines are extracted, information such as stress tensor maps can be derived (Hu et al, 2003a,b), and intra/intersubject comparisons can be made with statistical models of regional contractility (Augenstein and Young, 2001), enabling computer-aided diagnoses. In addition, given the boundary and regional contractility data, the contractility data can be spatially fused with data from other modalities, including perfusion MR, electrical activation (Sermesant et al, 2002) or blood flow (McQueen and Peskin, 2000), thus forming a more comprehensive evaluation of the heart.…”

A 3-D model-based registration approach for the PET, MR and MCG cardiac data fusion

“…In addition, it is formulated in the mechanical framework of elastic bodies that is often used in the context of motion estimation (Papademetris et al, 2001). The ARM is also closely related to the work of Sermesant et al (2001) who introduced an electromechanical model of the heart. In this model, the contraction is controlled by simulating the propagation of electrical waves and taking into account the interaction with ultrasound images.…”