Meshfree implementation of individualized active cardiac dynamics

The cardiac physiome model has been proven to be useful for cardiac simulation, and has been more recently utilized to medical image analysis. To perform individualized analysis, structural images are necessary to provide subject-specific cardiac geometries. Although finite element methods have been extensively used for the spatial discretization of the myocardium, their complicated meshing procedures and element-based interpolation functions often result in algorithms which are either easy to implement but numerically inaccurate, or accurate but labor-intensive. In consequence, we have adopted the meshfree platform which provides element-free approximations for computational cardiology. Complicated volume meshing procedures are excluded, and no re-meshing is needed for improving spatial accuracy when deformation occurs. Furthermore, the polynomial bases for spatial approximation are not limited by the element structure. As a result, the meshfree platform is more adaptive to different cardiac geometries and thus beneficial to individualized analysis. In this paper, the cardiac physiome model tailored for medical image analysis is presented with its detailed 3D implementation using the meshfree methods. Experiments were performed to compare the meshfree methods with the finite element methods, and simulations were done on a cubical object to investigate the local behaviors of the cardiac physiome model, and on a human heart geometry extracted from a magnetic resonance image to verify its physiological plausibility. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.