In vivo regional mechanics of the left atrium: linking mechanics to cardiovascular pathologies

尽管取得了重大进展，但心血管疾病仍然是发达国家的主要死亡原因。为了提出新的治疗和预防措施，有必要了解心血管器官因病理引起的力学和结构变化的基础。特别是，过度压力在引发心血管疾病中起着重要作用。本研究将结合连续介质力学、计算方法、计算机视觉和统计技术以及材料表征测试来研究高压对左心房结构、功能和重塑的影响。左心房正在成为心力衰竭治疗的新前沿。尽管心房颤动具有临床意义（在北美和欧洲，每年有超过90万例中风是由心房颤动引起的），但是，关于心房力学的可用数据比关于心室的可用数据少。对左心房因压力过载而发生的改变进行表征，有助于了解高血压引起的重构。人们对左心室进行了广泛的研究，但尚未对心房进行研究。

Despite major progresses, cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death in developed nations. In order to propose new therapeutic and preventive interventions, there exists a need to understand the foundation of the mechanical and structural changes of cardiovascular organs due to pathology. In particular, overpressure plays a major role in initiating cardiovascular diseases. The present proposal will use a combination of continuum mechanics, computational methods, computer vision and statistical techniques, and material characterization testing to investigate the effect of high pressure on the structure, function and remodeling of the left atrium. The left atrium is becoming the new frontier of heart failure treatment. Despite its clinical relevance (more than 900,000 strokes/year are due to atrial fibrillation in North America and Europe), however, fewer data are available on the mechanics of the atria than are on hand for the ventricles. The characterization of changes of the left atrium due to pressure overload will contribute to the understanding of remodeling due to hypertension. This has been studied extensively for the left ventricle but has not yet been studied in the atrium.