Smoothed particle hydrodynamics for electrophysiological modeling: an alternative to finite element methods

Abstract

Comunicació presentada a la 9th international conference on Functional Imaging and Modeling of the Heart (FIMH 2017), celebrada els dies 11 a 13 de juny de 2017 a Toronto, Canadà.Finite element methods (FEM) are generally used in cardiac 3D-electromechanical modeling. For FEM modeling, a step of a suitable mesh construction is required, which is non-trivial and time-consuming for complex geometries. A meshless method is proposed to avoid meshing. The smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method was used to solve an electrophysiological model on a left ventricle extracted from medical imaging straightforwardly, without any need of a complex mesh. The proposed method was compared against FEM in the same left-ventricular model. Both FEM and SPH methods provide similar solutions of the models in terms of depolarization times. Main differences were up to 10.9% at the apex. Finally, a pathological application of SPH is shown on the same ventricular geometry with an added scar on the heart wall.The work is supported by the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 642676 (CardioFunXion)