Finite Element Meshing for Cardiac Analysis∗

This application paper presents details of the technique we developed to produce an adaptive and quality tetrahedral finite element mesh model of a human heart. Beginning from a polygonal surface model consisting of twenty-two components, we first edit and convert it to volumetric gridded data. A component index for each cell edge and grid point is computed for assisting the boundary and material layer detection. Next we extract adaptive and quality tetrahedral meshes from the volumetric gridded data using our Level Set Boundary and Interior-Exterior (LBIE) Mesher. The mesh adaptivity is controlled using a feature sensitive error function. Multiple layers with different materials were identified and meshed. Furthermore, one of the heart valves in the input multi-component surface model was replaced. The extracted final tetrahedral mesh is being utilized in the analysis of cardiac fluid dynamics via finite element simulations.