Abstract
Finite strain analyses of the left ventricle provide important information on heart function and have the potential to provide insights into the biomechanics of myocardial contractility in health and disease. Systolic dysfunction is the most common cause of heart failure; however, abnormalities of diastolic function also contribute to heart failure, and are associated with conditions including left ventricular hypertrophy and diabetes. The clinical significance of diastolic abnormalities is less well understood than systolic dysfunction, and specific treatments are presently lacking. To obtain qualitative and quantitative information on heart function in diastole, we develop a three-dimensional computational model of the human left ventricle that is derived from noninvasive imaging data. This anatomically realistic model has a rule-based fibre structure and a structure-based constitutive model. We investigate the sensitivity of this comprehensive model to small changes in the constitutive parameters and to changes in the fibre distribution. We make extensive comparisons between this model and similar models that employ different constitutive models, and we demonstrate qualitative and quantitative differences in stress and strain distributions for the different constitutive models. We also provide an initial validation of our model through comparisons to experimental data on stress and strain distributions in the left ventricle. Copyright (C) 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 83-103 |
Number of pages | 21 |
Journal | International journal for numerical methods in biomedical engineering |
Volume | 29 |
Issue number | 1 |
Early online date | 27 Jun 2012 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Jan 2013 |
Bibliographical note
We gratefully acknowledge support from the Excellence Exchange Project funded by the Xi'an Jiaotong University, and support from the British Heart Foundation, the Medical Research Scotland, the Chief Scientist Office, the Scottish Funding Council and EPSRC grant EP/I02990. B.E.G. was supported in part by American Heart Association Scientist Development Grant 10SDG4320049 and by National Science Foundation Awards DMS 1016554 and OCI 1047734.Keywords
- left ventricle in diastole
- constitutive law
- fibre structure
- finite element methods
- nonlinear finite strain
- MRI