The impact of myocardial compressibility on organ-level simulations of the normal and infarcted heart.

Myocardial infarction (MI) rapidly impairs cardiac contractile function and instigates maladaptive remodeling leading to heart failure. Patient-specific models are a maturing technology for developing and determining therapeutic modalities for MI that require accurate descriptions of myocardial mechanics. While substantial tissue volume reductions of 15-20% during systole have been reported, myocardium is commonly modeled as incompressible.

A Contemporary Look at Biomechanical Models of Myocardium.

Understanding and predicting the mechanical behavior of myocardium under healthy and pathophysiological conditions are vital to developing novel cardiac therapies and promoting personalized interventions. Within the past 30 years, various constitutive models have been proposed for the passive mechanical behavior of myocardium. These models cover a broad range of mathematical forms, microstructural observations, and specific test conditions to which they are fitted.

Geometric surrogates of abdominal aortic aneurysm wall mechanics.

The maximum diameter criterion is the most important factor in the clinical management of abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAA). Consequently, interventional repair is recommended when an aneurysm reaches a critical diameter, typically 5.0 cm in the United States.

Electromechanical cardioplasty using a wrapped elasto-conductive epicardial mesh.

Heart failure remains a major public health concern with a 5-year mortality rate higher than that of most cancers. Myocardial disease in heart failure is frequently accompanied by impairment of the specialized electrical conduction system and myocardium. We introduce an epicardial mesh made of electrically conductive and mechanically elastic material, to resemble the innate cardiac tissue and confer cardiac conduction system function, to enable electromechanical cardioplasty.

An approach for patient-specific multi-domain vascular mesh generation featuring spatially varying wall thickness modeling.

In this work, we present a computationally efficient image-derived volume mesh generation approach for vasculatures that implements spatially varying patient-specific wall thickness with a novel inward extrusion of the wall surface mesh. Multi-domain vascular meshes with arbitrary numbers, locations, and patterns of both iliac bifurcations and thrombi can be obtained without the need to specify features or landmark points as input. In addition, the mesh output is coordinate-frame independent and independent of the image grid resolution with high dimensional accuracy and mesh quality, devoid of errors typically found in off-the-shelf image-based model generation workflows.

The importance of patient-specific regionally varying wall thickness in abdominal aortic aneurysm biomechanics.

Abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is a vascular condition where the use of a biomechanics-based assessment for patient-specific risk assessment is a promising approach for clinical management of the disease. Among various factors that affect such assessment, AAA wall thickness is expected to be an important factor. However, regionally varying patient-specific wall thickness has not been incorporated as a modeling feature in AAA biomechanics.

Fluid-structure interaction modeling of abdominal aortic aneurysms: the impact of patient-specific inflow conditions and fluid/solid coupling.

Rupture risk assessment of abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAA) by means of biomechanical analysis is a viable alternative to the traditional clinical practice of using a critical diameter for recommending elective repair. However, an accurate prediction of biomechanical parameters, such as mechanical stress, strain, and shear stress, is possible if the AAA models and boundary conditions are truly patient specific. In this work, we present a complete fluid-structure interaction (FSI) framework for patient-specific AAA passive mechanics assessment that utilizes individualized inflow and outflow boundary conditions.

The role of geometric and biomechanical factors in abdominal aortic aneurysm rupture risk assessment.

The current clinical management of abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) disease is based to a great extent on measuring the aneurysm maximum diameter to decide when timely intervention is required. Decades of clinical evidence show that aneurysm diameter is positively associated with the risk of rupture, but other parameters may also play a role in causing or predisposing the AAA to rupture. Geometric factors such as vessel tortuosity, intraluminal thrombus volume, and wall surface area are implicated in the differentiation of ruptured and unruptured AAAs.