Progress towards an electromechanical model of the heart for cardiac image analysis

We present a 3D numerical model of the heart ventricles which couples electrical and biomechanical activities. We have adopted a simpler formulation of previously published models to achieve a trade-off between biological accuracy and computational efficiency. To carry out computations, the FitzHugh-Nagumo equations are solved along with a constitutive law based on the Hill-Maxwell rheological law. Ultimately, the parameters of this generic model will be adjusted from the actual patient´s ECG and from the cardiac motion measured in 4D cardiac images. By including biological and physical a priori knowledge, we expect to extract quantitative ventricular function parameters from time sequences of cardiac images.