High-Order Cardiomyopathy Human Heart Model and Mesh Generation.

Abstract

Faithful, accurate, and successful cardiac biomechanics and electrophysiological simulations require patient-specific geometric models of the heart. Since the cardiac geometry consists of highly-curved boundaries, the use of high-order meshes with curved elements would ensure that the various curves and features present in the cardiac geometry are well-captured and preserved in the corresponding mesh. Most other existing mesh generation techniques require computer-aided design files to represent the geometric boundary, which are often not available for biomedical applications. Unlike such methods, our technique takes a high-order surface mesh, generated from patient medical images, as input and generates a high-order volume mesh directly from the curved surface mesh. In this paper, we use our direct high-order curvilinear tetrahedral mesh generation method [1] to generate several second-order cardiac meshes. Our meshes include the left ventricle myocardia of a healthy heart and hearts with dilated and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. We show that our high-order cardiac meshes do not contain inverted elements and are of sufficiently high quality for use in cardiac finite element simulations.