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，并有助于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，但这通常仅限于单一功能，如电生理学、生物力学、心脏血液流动或循环系统。这些单一物理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，以充分利用计算机方法的潜力。该项目旨在通过开发和评估具有高生物物理精度的心脏机电系统模型的鲁棒耦合方案，扩展人类心脏多物理场模拟的限制。通过将我们在分别建模每个心脏物理系统方面的深厚跨学科经验与我们在耦合它们方面的初步工作相结合，我们能够很好地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，我们将开发并提供(1)一个包含主动电生理学，心脏力学和循环功能的整个心脏的健壮耦合模型的公式；(2)对该模型进行了高效、可扩展的数值实现，并对空间和时间上的逼近进行了全面的收敛性分析；(3)将完全耦合模型用户友好地集成到已建立的openCARP仿真框架中，以促进社区采用该研究工具并为临床翻译铺平道路。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一个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，将促进未来计算机方法的临床采用。

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.