Manifold-Based B-Splines on Unstructured Meshes

We introduce new manifold-based splines that are able to exactly reproduce B-splines on unstructured surface meshes. Such splines can be used in isogeometric analysis (IGA) to represent smooth surfaces of arbitrary topology. Since prevalent computer-aided design (CAD) models are composed of tensor-product B-spline patches, any IGA suitable construction should be able to reproduce B-splines. To achieve this goal, we focus on univariate manifold-based constructions that can reproduce B-splines. The manifold-based splines are constructed by smoothly blending together polynomial interpolants defined on overlapping charts. The proposed constructions automatically reproduce B-splines in regular parts of the mesh, with no extraordinary vertices, and polynomial basis functions in the remaining parts of the mesh. We study and compare analytically and numerically the finite element convergence of several univariate constructions. The obtained results directly carry over to the tensor-product case

Biomechanics simulations using cubic Hermite meshes with extraordinary nodes for isogeometric cardiac modeling

Cubic Hermite hexahedral finite element meshes have some well-known advantages over linear tetrahedral finite element meshes in biomechanical and anatomic modeling using isogeometric analysis. These include faster convergence rates as well as the ability to easily model rule-based anatomic features such as cardiac fiber directions. However, it is not possible to create closed complex objects with only regular nodes; these objects require the presence of extraordinary nodes (nodes with 3 or >= 5 adjacent elements in 2D) in the mesh. The presence of extraordinary nodes requires new constraints on the derivatives of adjacent elements to maintain continuity. We have developed a new method that uses an ensemble coordinate frame at the nodes and a local-to-global mapping to maintain continuity. In this paper, we make use of this mapping to create cubic Hermite models of the human ventricles and a four-chamber heart. We also extend the methods to the finite element equations to perform biomechanics simulations using these meshes. The new methods are validated using simple test models and applied to anatomically accurate ventricular meshes with valve annuli to simulate complete cardiac cycle simulations

A versatile strategy for the implementation of adaptive splines

This paper presents an implementation framework for spline spaces over T-meshes (and their d-dimensional analogs). The aim is to share code between the implementations of several spline spaces. This is achieved by reducing evaluation to a generalized Bézier extraction. The approach was tested by implementing hierarchical B-splines, truncated hierarchical B-splines, decoupled hierarchical B-splines (a novel variation presented here), truncated B-splines for partially nested refinement and hierarchical LR-splines