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

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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.