Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics for Electrophysiological Modeling: An Alternative to Finite Element Methods

摘要

Finite element methods (FEM) are generally used in cardiac 3D-electromechanical modeling. For FEM modeling, a step of a suitable mesh construction is required, which is non-trivial and time-consuming for complex geometries. A meshless method is proposed to avoid meshing. The smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method was used to solve an electrophysiological model on a left ventricle extracted from medical imaging straightforwardly, without any need of a complex mesh. The proposed method was compared against FEM in the same left-ventricular model. Both FEM and SPH methods provide similar solutions of the models in terms of depolarization times. Main differences were up to 10.9% at the apex. Finally, a pathological application of SPH is shown on the same ventricular geometry with an added scar on the heart wall.