Efficient and robust coupling methods for electro-mechanic models of the human heart

心脏病是德国的头号死因。心血管系统的计算建模可以帮助理解相关机制，并帮助定制心脏病的治疗方法。尽管心脏计算建模在过去几十年中取得了显著进展，但这通常限于单一功能，如电生理学，生物力学，心脏或循环系统中的血流。这些单物理场方法是非常有价值的研究工具，但需要心脏功能的相互作用，以充分发挥在silico approaches.This project的潜力，旨在通过开发和评估强大的耦合方案的心脏机电系统的模型，在多个尺度和维度的高生物物理精度扩展人类心脏的多物理场模拟的限制。通过结合我们在分别对每个心脏物理系统建模方面的深刻的跨学科经验和我们在耦合它们方面的初步工作，我们处于有利地位，可以构建和分析完全耦合系统的高效和准确的并行有限元实现。作为具体目标，我们将开发和提供（1）整个心脏的鲁棒耦合模型的公式，包括 主动电生理学、心脏力学和循环功能;（2）该模型的有效和可扩展的数值实现， 空间和时间近似的全面收敛分析;（3）用户友好地将完全耦合模型集成到 建立openCARP模拟框架， 在openCARP生态系统中，这种耦合机电模型的数值实现将成为解决复杂心血管疾病的医疗设备中有价值的补充研究工具。我们的社区建设和开放科学努力，以及在医学相关场景中的转化概念验证应用，将促进未来临床采用计算机模拟方法。

Cardiac diseases are the number one cause of death in Germany. Computational modeling of the cardiovascular system can help to understand the relevant mechanisms and help to tailor treatments for heart diseases. Although cardiac computational modeling has significantly advanced in the last decades, this is often limited to a single function such as electrophysiology, biomechanics, blood flow in the heart or the circulatory system. These single-physics approaches are very valuable research tools, but the interaction of cardiac functions is required to fully leverage the potential of in silico approaches.This project aims to extend the limits of multi-physics simulations of the human heart by developing and evaluating robust coupling schemes for models of the cardiac electro-mechanical system with high biophysical accuracy across multiple scales and dimensions. By combining our profound interdisciplinary experience in modeling each of the cardiac physical systems separately with our preliminary work in coupling them, we are well positioned to construct and analyze an efficient and accurate parallel finiteelement realization of the fully coupled system.As specific goals, we will develop and provide(1) a formulation for a robustly coupled model for the whole heart comprising active electrophysiology, cardiac mechanics and circulatory function;(2) an efficient and scalable numerical implementation of this model and a comprehensive convergence analysis of the approximations in space and time;(3) a user-friendly integration of the fully coupled model into the established openCARP simulation framework to foster community adoption of this research tool and pave the way for clinical translation.The numerical implementation of this coupled electro-mechanical model within the openCARP ecosystem will be a valuable complementary research tool in the armamentarium to tackle complex cardiovascular diseases. Our community building and open science efforts together with a translational proof-of-concept application in a medically relevant scenario will foster future clinical adoption of in silico methods.