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

心血管疾病在德国2007年造成358，684人死亡，具有巨大的流行病学重要性。从卫生经济学的角度来看，它们也具有极端的相关性。2006年，全球心血管疾病的费用接近350亿欧元。干扰的传导和不协调的电信号可以产生异常的心律，即所谓的心律失常。心律失常会引起各种症状，从几乎不明显的症状到心血管崩溃、心脏骤停和死亡。在患者特定治疗期间，可以通过开发有效的模拟工具来支持心脏病学家，以便对实验技术缺乏的每个临床情况进行系统分析。该研究的目标是为人类心脏的电生理学和机电学建立新颖有效的数值方案，并在第一阶段进行三维通用心脏几何形状的分析，并在第二阶段（2015-2017）进行基于MRI数据和局部组织各向异性信息的三维复杂心脏几何形状的分析。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匀化响应。然而，这种表示在模拟（去）纤颤现象时限制太多，这需要双主表示。心脏组织的双主模型包括描述细胞内和细胞外势场的耦合方程系统。特别是，高效，全隐式，bidomain为基础的数值工具和完全耦合的机电公式将被开发。将根据基于bidomain的电生理和完全机电公式计算所得心电图（ECG）。

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.