45 research outputs found
A multiresolution space-time adaptive scheme for the bidomain model in electrocardiology
This work deals with the numerical solution of the monodomain and bidomain
models of electrical activity of myocardial tissue. The bidomain model is a
system consisting of a possibly degenerate parabolic PDE coupled with an
elliptic PDE for the transmembrane and extracellular potentials, respectively.
This system of two scalar PDEs is supplemented by a time-dependent ODE modeling
the evolution of the so-called gating variable. In the simpler sub-case of the
monodomain model, the elliptic PDE reduces to an algebraic equation. Two simple
models for the membrane and ionic currents are considered, the
Mitchell-Schaeffer model and the simpler FitzHugh-Nagumo model. Since typical
solutions of the bidomain and monodomain models exhibit wavefronts with steep
gradients, we propose a finite volume scheme enriched by a fully adaptive
multiresolution method, whose basic purpose is to concentrate computational
effort on zones of strong variation of the solution. Time adaptivity is
achieved by two alternative devices, namely locally varying time stepping and a
Runge-Kutta-Fehlberg-type adaptive time integration. A series of numerical
examples demonstrates thatthese methods are efficient and sufficiently accurate
to simulate the electrical activity in myocardial tissue with affordable
effort. In addition, an optimalthreshold for discarding non-significant
information in the multiresolution representation of the solution is derived,
and the numerical efficiency and accuracy of the method is measured in terms of
CPU time speed-up, memory compression, and errors in different norms.Comment: 25 pages, 41 figure
Adaptive multiresolution computations applied to detonations
A space-time adaptive method is presented for the reactive Euler equations
describing chemically reacting gas flow where a two species model is used for
the chemistry. The governing equations are discretized with a finite volume
method and dynamic space adaptivity is introduced using multiresolution
analysis. A time splitting method of Strang is applied to be able to consider
stiff problems while keeping the method explicit. For time adaptivity an
improved Runge--Kutta--Fehlberg scheme is used. Applications deal with
detonation problems in one and two space dimensions. A comparison of the
adaptive scheme with reference computations on a regular grid allow to assess
the accuracy and the computational efficiency, in terms of CPU time and memory
requirements.Comment: Zeitschrift f\"ur Physicalische Chemie, accepte
BPX preconditioners for the Bidomain model of electrocardiology
The aim of this work is to develop a BPX preconditioner for the Bidomain model of electrocardiology. This model describes the bioelectrical activity of the cardiac tissue and consists of a system of a non-linear parabolic reaction\u2013diffusion partial differential equation (PDE) and an elliptic linear PDE, modeling at macroscopic level the evolution of the transmembrane and extracellular electric potentials of the anisotropic cardiac tissue. The evolution equation is coupled through the non-linear reaction term with a stiff system of ordinary differential equations, the so-called membrane model, describing the ionic currents through the cellular membrane. The discretization of the coupled system by finite elements in space and semi-implicit finite differences in time yields at each time step the solution of an ill-conditioned linear system. The goal of the present study is to construct, analyze and numerically test a BPX preconditioner for the linear system arising from the discretization of the Bidomain model. Optimal convergence rate estimates are established and verified by two- and three-dimensional numerical tests on both structured and unstructured meshes. Moreover, in a full heartbeat simulation on a three-dimensional wedge of ventricular tissue, the BPX preconditioner is about 35% faster in terms of CPU times than ILU(0) and an Algebraic Multigrid preconditioner
Optimized schwarz methods and model adaptivity in electrocardiology simulations
[No abstract available
The LifeV library: engineering mathematics beyond the proof of concept
LifeV is a library for the finite element (FE) solution of partial
differential equations in one, two, and three dimensions. It is written in C++
and designed to run on diverse parallel architectures, including cloud and high
performance computing facilities. In spite of its academic research nature,
meaning a library for the development and testing of new methods, one
distinguishing feature of LifeV is its use on real world problems and it is
intended to provide a tool for many engineering applications. It has been
actually used in computational hemodynamics, including cardiac mechanics and
fluid-structure interaction problems, in porous media, ice sheets dynamics for
both forward and inverse problems. In this paper we give a short overview of
the features of LifeV and its coding paradigms on simple problems. The main
focus is on the parallel environment which is mainly driven by domain
decomposition methods and based on external libraries such as MPI, the Trilinos
project, HDF5 and ParMetis.
Dedicated to the memory of Fausto Saleri.Comment: Review of the LifeV Finite Element librar
Efficient adaptivity for simulating cardiac electrophysiology with spectral deferred correction methods
The locality of solution features in cardiac electrophysiology simulations
calls for adaptive methods. Due to the overhead incurred by established mesh
refinement and coarsening, however, such approaches failed in accelerating the
computations. Here we investigate a different route to spatial adaptivity that
is based on nested subset selection for algebraic degrees of freedom in
spectral deferred correction methods. This combination of algebraic adaptivity
and iterative solvers for higher order collocation time stepping realizes a
multirate integration with minimal overhead. This leads to moderate but
significant speedups in both monodomain and cell-by-cell models of cardiac
excitation, as demonstrated at four numerical examples.Comment: 12 pages, 12 figure
An introduction to mathematical and numerical modeling in heart electrophysiology
The electrical activation of the heart is the biological process that regulates the contraction of the cardiac muscle, allowing it to pump blood to the whole body. In physiological conditions, the pacemaker cells of the sinoatrial node generate an action potential (a sudden variation of the cell transmembrane potential) which, following preferential conduction pathways, propagates throughout the heart walls and triggers the contraction of the heart chambers. The action potential propagation can be mathematically described by coupling a model for the ionic currents, flowing through the membrane of a single cell, with a macroscopical model that describes the propagation of the electrical signal in the cardiac tissue. The most accurate model available in the literature for the description of the macroscopic propagation in the muscle is the Bidomain model, a degenerate parabolic system composed of two non-linear partial differential equations for the intracellular and extracellular potential. In this paper, we present an introduction to the fundamental aspects of mathematical modeling and numerical simulation in cardiac electrophysiology