Evaluating computational efforts and physiological resolution of mathematical models of cardiac tissue.

Computational techniques have significantly advanced our understanding of cardiac electrophysiology, yet they have predominantly concentrated on averaged models that do not represent the intricate dynamics near individual cardiomyocytes. Recently, accurate models representing individual cells have gained popularity, enabling analysis of the electrophysiology at the micrometer level. Here, we evaluate five mathematical models to determine their computational efficiency and physiological fidelity.

A cell-based framework for modeling cardiac mechanics.

Cardiomyocytes are the functional building blocks of the heart-yet most models developed to simulate cardiac mechanics do not represent the individual cells and their surrounding matrix. Instead, they work on a homogenized tissue level, assuming that cellular and subcellular structures and processes scale uniformly. Here we present a mathematical and numerical framework for exploring tissue-level cardiac mechanics on a microscale given an explicit three-dimensional geometrical representation of cells embedded in a matrix.