Abstract
In order to simulate the cardiac function for a patient‐specific geometry, the generation of the computational mesh is crucially important. In practice, the input is typically a set of unprocessed polygonal surfaces coming either from a template geometry or from medical images. These surfaces need ad‐hoc processing to be suitable for a volumetric mesh generation. In this work we propose a set of new algorithms and tools aiming to facilitate the mesh generation process. In particular, we focus on different aspects of a cardiac mesh generation pipeline: (1) specific polygonal surface processing for cardiac geometries, like connection of different heart chambers or segmentation outputs; (2) generation of accurate boundary tags; (3) definition of mesh‐size functions dependent on relevant geometric quantities; (4) processing and connecting together several volumetric meshes. The new algorithms—implemented in the open‐source software vmtk—can be combined with each other allowing the creation of personalized pipelines, that can be optimized for each cardiac geometry or for each aspect of the cardiac function to be modeled. Thanks to these features, the proposed tools can significantly speed‐up the mesh generation process for a large range of cardiac applications, from single‐chamber single‐physics simulations to multi‐chambers multi‐physics simulations. We detail all the proposed algorithms motivating them in the cardiac context and we highlight their flexibility by showing different examples of cardiac mesh generation pipelines.
Highlights
The mathematical and numerical modeling of the cardiac function is a very challenging research topic.[1]
The automatic generation of tags identifies particular regions like the valvular annulus (Figure 4, right, in blue) that cannot be reconstructed from medical images and that can be defined with a realistic thickness by suitably tuning the parameter ε
The connectivity algorithm is useful in some particular cases like, for instance, in order to distinguish between endocardium and epicardium after the individuation of the valvular rings
Summary
The mathematical and numerical modeling of the cardiac function is a very challenging research topic.[1]. Both the ventricular and the atrial muscles are in continuity from the left to the right side of the heart, while they are connected to each other only by the fibrotic tissue of the annuli, which acts as electrical insulators.[16] On the contrary, from the hemodynamic point of view, the internal cavities are connected only along the atrioventricular direction, while a clear separation between the right and the left cavities is necessary to divide the oxygenated and the non-oxygenated blood.[16] from the geometric point of view, a complete electro-mechano-fluid model of the cardiac function must take into account both the atrio-ventricular muscle separation and the right–left hemodynamic division. Depending on the focus of the study, this geometric complexity can be addressed with a different level of detail, see for example, Figure 1B–D
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