Computational Electromechanics of the Heart: Development of FE-Based Predictive Simulation Tools for Patient Specific Analysis

2007年，心血管疾病在德国造成358,684人死亡，具有巨大的流行病学重要性。从卫生经济的角度来看，它们也具有极端的相关性。2006年，全球心血管疾病的成本接近350亿欧元。异常的传导和不协调的电信号会产生异常的心律失常，即所谓的心律失常。心律失常可以引起各种症状，从几乎不明显的症状到心血管衰竭、心脏骤停和死亡。心脏病专家可以通过开发有效的模拟工具，对实验技术缺乏的每种临床情况进行系统分析，在针对患者的治疗期间提供支持。该研究的目标是建立新的、高效的人体心脏电生理学和电机学数值格式，并在第一阶段基于MRI数据和局部组织各向异性信息对三维通用心脏几何进行分析，在第二阶段(2015-2017)进行三维复杂心脏几何分析。心脏组织的分析通常基于心肌的单域表示，其中考虑了细胞外和细胞内介质的均质响应。然而，这种表示法在模拟(去)纤颤现象方面有太多的限制，这就需要用双项式表示法。心脏组织的Biomain模型由一组描述细胞内和细胞外势场的耦合方程组成。特别是，将开发高效的、完全隐式的、基于比多曼的数值工具和完全耦合的机电公式。由此产生的心电图将从基于毕多明的电生理和完全机电配方中计算出来。

Cardiovascular diseases caused 358,684 deaths in Germany 2007 and have an enormous epidemiological importance. They are also of extreme relevance from the health-economical view. The costs of cardiovascular diseases 2006 were nearly 35 billion Euro worldwide. Disturbed conduction and uncoordinated electrical signals can generate abnormal heart rhythms, so-called arrhythmias. Arrhythmias can cause a variety of symptoms from barely noticeable ones to cardiovascular collapse, cardiac arrest and death. Cardiologists can be supported during the patient-specific therapy through the development of efficient simulation tools for the systematic analysis of each clinical situation where the experimental techniques lack. The goal of the intended research is to establish novel and efficient numerical schemes for the electrophysiology and electromechanics of human heart and to carry out analysis of three-dimensional generic heart geometry in the first phase and a three-dimensional complex heart geometry based on MRI data and on local tissue anisotropy information in the second phase (2015-2017). The analysis of cardiac tissue is generally based on monodomain representation of myocardium where a homogenized response of extra- and intracellular medium is considered. However, this representation is too restrictive in modeling the (de)fibrillation phenomena, which necessitates bidomain representation. The bidomain model of cardiac tissue comprises a coupled system of equations describing the intracellular and extracellular potential fields. Particularly, efficient, fully implicit, bidomain based numerical tools and fully coupled electromechanical formulations will be developed. The resultant electrocardiograms (ECG) will be computed from bidomain based electrophysiological and fully electromechanical formulations.