ESTIMATING THE CONTOUR OF THE LEFT VENTRICULAR USING BOUNDARY ELEMENT METHOD AND BIOMECHANICAL MODEL

摘要

In this paper, a Boundary Element Method (BEM) is applied to a biomechanical model of the heart to estimate the left ventricular boundaries from 2D echocardiographic image sequence. A brief about nonlinear continuum mechanics is presented. The total biomechanical model constitutive equation consists of passive and active strain energy functional to represent the full cardiac cycle. The BEM is used to obtain the left ventricular finite deformations. The incremental iterative procedure is employed to solve the nonlinear equations of the BEM. The constraint of incompressibility condition is satisfied in each cell inside the LV domain as a part of the solution of the total constitutive equation. Some experimental results using the implemented procedure are given to verify the estimated contours.