Volumetric Modeling Electromechanics of the Heart

Heart is an electromechanical coupled organ, thus it is important to integrate electrical and mechanical functions when building a computational model of the heart. The existing models either treat electrical and mechanical functions separately, or follow a so-called ”one-way” electromechanical coupling. However, electrical and mechanical functions of the heart are depended on each other, and realistic simulation results can only be achieved when such coupled relationship is considered. In this paper, we propose a generic model to simulate electromechanics of the heart that takes both electromechanical coupling and mechanoelectrical feedback into account. The model contains four components: cardiac electrophysiological model, electromechanical coupling, cardiac mechanics model and mechanoelectrical feedback. We report numerical simulations of a cube to provide an insight of the electromechanical coupled behavior of our model. Experiments have also been performed on a biventricular heart which present physiological plausible values, such as transmembrane potential (TMP) maps and strain maps.