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.
Highlights
Cardiac diseases remain a major public health burden
We model left ventricular diastolic mechanics using a structure-based constitutive model of the left ventricle (LV) in conjunction with human anatomical geometry obtained from noninvasive imaging studies
Sensitivity to the material parameters in the constitutive law Following Holzapfel and Ogden [5] and Göktepe et al [31], we estimate the eight material parameters a, b, ai, bi .i D f, s, fs) in the constitutive model stated in Equation (3) using data from simple shear tests on porcine ventricular myocardium reported by Dokos et al [15]
Summary
Cardiac diseases remain a major public health burden. Because of improvements in early survival post-myocardial infarction, an increasing number of people are living with injured hearts, and these patients are subject to an increased risk of subsequent heart failure and premature death [1]. Improvements in risk assessment are urgently needed to identify high-risk patients and to stratify therapeutic approaches. Epidemiological studies have shown that at least 50% of heart failure patients have normal systolic pump function and left ventricular ejection fraction; these patients are said to suffer from left ventricular diastolic dysfunction [2,3,4]. Theoretical, computational, and experimental analyses of the diastolic mechanics of the left ventricle (LV) can be used to develop an
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