CDS&E: Collaborative Research: A Computational Framework for Reconstructing and Visualizing Myocardial Active Stresses

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The normal heart functions by contracting and pushing the blood from the left ventricle into the rest of the body. Due to various diseases, the contraction capabilities of the heart become diminished in certain regions of the heart chamber wall, compromising the overall function of the heart. In order to identify and select optimal treatment, it is critical to identify the regions of the heart wall that exhibit reduced contractions. Unfortunately, contractions cannot be easily measured. This project will estimate the stress (contraction power) developed within the heart muscle by combining medical imaging and mechanical modeling of the heart. These stresses will serve as a quantitative measure of the contractile function of the heart and help detect and localize disease. Therefore, this research has the potential to evolve into a future tool to diagnose cardiac function. This project will also feature a synergistically integrated education and outreach program. We will foster research opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students in computer science, biomedical engineering, mathematics, and imaging science at Rochester Institute of Technology and the University of Kansas. The PIs will develop innovative hands-on workshops to inspire and educate K-12 students from underrepresented groups on biomedical computing and medicine. This project proposes to develop a method that enables non-invasive appraisal and visualization of the active stresses developed in the myocardium to serve as a direct means to assess the bio-mechanical function of the heart. The PIs will develop open-source cyberinfrastructure and integrate it into a novel computational framework for cardiac biomechanics that will reconstruct the active stresses from cardiac deformations. The PIs will accomplish this goal by developing and integrating techniques for medical image computing, high-order meshing, and inverse-problem bio-mechanical modeling. This research will address a currently unexplored niche in the cardiac modeling field, specifically the reconstruction and visualization of myocardial active stresses, to enable direct appraisal of cardiac function. This research will contribute to medical image computing through the development of algorithms for medical image processing and visualization. The PIs will develop and implement novel high-order meshing techniques and integrate them with the fiber architecture to enable accurate and efficient scientific modeling and computing. The project will contribute new knowledge in mathematical modeling and simulation by implementing efficient nonlinear least-squares solutions for inverse cardiac biomechanics. Lastly, the PIs will release the resulting cyberinfrastructure to the scientific computing community for research and education use.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.