An initial biphasic model of the human heart aimed at computational investigation of rheumatic heart disease

Abstract eng:
Rheumatic Heart Disease (RHD) is identified as a serious health concern in developing countries, specifically amongst young individuals, accounting for between 250 000 and 1.4 million deaths annually. As such, attention is initially placed on emphasis of the importance of the development of a cardiac analysis toolbox with functionality for pathophysiological analysis of the disease. In order to further the understanding of the mechanisms of the disease as linked to changes in the cytoskeletal architecture and hypertrophy of cardiac myocytes, a continuum bi-phasic model applicable to cardiac tissue is formulated based on the Theory of Porous Media (TPM). This makes it possible to account for interactions and contributions of multiple phases of constituent materials as well as concentrations of solved components, that is here a solid phase, the cardiac tissue, and the liquid phase, blood. Therefore, subsequent attention is paid to the primary cardiac model development in order to implement a sound base on which to add stressand nutrient-driven phase transition, in addition to a nutrient phase contained within the liquid phase. To this end, based on thermodynamical restrictions, constitutive relations are proposed for stress, permeability, seepage velocity and interaction forces. The approach is implemented in the in-house computational cardiac mechanics toolbox SESKA which supports finite element as well as Element-free Galerkin-based approximations. This paper considers the passive orthotropic nonlinear elastic material behaviour of the myocardium of the left and right ventricles and illustrates the progress towards development of a cardiac growth model where additionally the active contraction response and the coupling to the hemodynamics of circulatory system will be taken into account facilitating modelling of the entire heart cycle.

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