Validation of a Finite Element Method framework for cardiac mechanics applications

摘要

Modeling cardiac mechanics is a particularly challenging task, mainly because of the poor understanding of the underlying physiology, the lack of observability and the complexity of the mechanical properties of myocardial tissues. The choice of cardiac mechanic solvers, especially, implies several difficulties, notably due to the potential instability arising from the nonlinearities inherent to the large deformation framework. Furthermore, the verification of the obtained simulations is a difficult task because there is no analytic solutions for these kinds of problems. Hence, the objective of this work is to provide a quantitative verification of a cardiac mechanics implementation based on two published benchmark problems. The first problem consists in deforming a bar whereas the second problem concerns the inflation of a truncated ellipsoid-shaped ventricle, both in the steady state case. Simulations were obtained by using the finite element software GETFEM++. Results were compared to the consensus solution published by 11 groups and the proposed solutions were indistinguishable. The validation of the proposed mechanical model implementation is an important step toward the proposition of a global model of cardiac electro-mechanical activity.