The monodomain model is widely used in in-silico cardiology to describe excitation propagation in the myocardium. Frequently, operator splitting is used to decouple the stiff reaction term and the diffusion term in the monodomain model so that they can be solved separately. Commonly, the diffusion term is solved implicitly with a large time step while the reaction term is solved by using an explicit method with adaptive time stepping. In this work, we propose a fully explicit method for the solution of the decoupled monodomain model. In contrast to semi-implicit methods, fully explicit methods present lower memory footprint and higher scalability. However, such methods are only conditionally stable. We overcome the conditional stability limitation by proposing a dual adaptive explicit method in which adaptive time integration is applied for the solution of both the reaction and diffusion terms. In a set of numerical examples where cardiac propagation is simulated under physiological and pathophysiological conditions, results show that our proposed method presents preserved accuracy and improved computational efficiency as compared to standard operator splitting-based methods.
In this paper we consider the monodomain model of cardiac electrophysiology. After an analysis of the well-posedness of the model, we determine an asymptotic expansion of the perturbed potential due to the presence of small conductivity inhomogeneities (modeling small ischemic regions in the cardiac tissue) and use it to detect the anomalies from partial boundary measurements. This is done by determining the topological gradient of a suitable boundary misfit functional. The robustness of the algorithm is confirmed by several numerical experiments.
Meshfree methods for in silico modelling and simulation of cardiac electrophysiology are gaining more and more popularity. These methods do not require a mesh and are more suitable than the Finite Element Method (FEM) to simulate the activity of complex geometrical structures like the human heart. However, challenges such as numerical integration accuracy and time efficiency remain and limit their applicability. Recently, the Fragile Points Method (FPM) has been introduced in the meshfree methods family. It uses local, simple, polynomial, discontinuous functions to construct trial and test fun…
Computational models in cardiac electrophysiology are notorious for long runtimes, restricting the numbers of nodes and mesh elements in the numerical discretisations used for their solution. This makes it particularly challenging to incorporate structural heterogeneities on small spatial scales, preventing a full understanding of the critical arrhythmogenic effects of conditions such as cardiac fibrosis. In this work, we explore the technique of homogenisation by volume averaging for the inclusion of non-conductive micro-structures into larger-scale cardiac meshes with minor computational ove…
Computational modelling of cardiac ischaemia using a variable-order fractional Laplacian
Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）；Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers（澳大利亚研究委员会数学与统计前沿卓越中心）
We present a novel approach which aims at high-performance uncertainty quantification for cardiac electrophysiology simulations. Employing the monodomain equation to model the transmembrane potential inside the cardiac cells, we evaluate the effect of spatially correlated perturbations of the heart fibers on the statistics of the resulting quantities of interest. Our methodology relies on a close integration of multilevel quadrature methods, parallel iterative solvers and space-time finite element discretizations, allowing for a fully parallelized framework in space, time and stochastics. Exte…
In this work we address the issue of validating the monodomain equation used in combination with the Bueno-Orovio ionic model for the prediction of the activation times in cardiac electro-physiology of the left ventricle. To this aim, we consider our patients who suffered from Left Bundle Branch Block (LBBB). We use activation maps performed at the septum as input data for the model and maps at the epicardial veins for the validation. In particular, a first set (half) of the latter are used to estimate the conductivities of the patient and a second set (the remaining half) to compute the error…
We present a novel approach aimed at high-performance uncertainty quantification for time-dependent problems governed by partial differential equations. In particular, we consider input uncertainties described by a Karhunen-Loeeve expansion and compute statistics of high-dimensional quantities-of-interest, such as the cardiac activation potential. Our methodology relies on a close integration of multilevel Monte Carlo methods, parallel iterative solvers, and a space-time discretization. This combination allows for space-time adaptivity, time-changing domains, and to take advantage of past samp…
