Progress towards an electromechanical model of the heart for cardiac image analysis

We present a 3D numerical model of the heart ventricles which couples electrical and biomechanical activities. We have adopted a simpler formulation of previously published models to achieve a trade-off between biological accuracy and computational efficiency. To carry out computations, the FitzHugh-Nagumo equations are solved along with a constitutive law based on the Hill-Maxwell rheological law. Ultimately, the parameters of this generic model will be adjusted from the actual patient’s ECG and from the cardiac motion measured in 4D cardiac images. By including biological and physical a priori knowledge, we expect to extract quantitative ventricular function parameters from time sequences of cardiac images1.