Dominique Chapelle

(Directeur de recherche Inria Saclay-Ile-de-France)

“Biomechanical modeling of the heart: from multi-scale multi-physics formulations to patient-specific simulations”

Abstract:
The heart undergoes some highly complex multi-scale multi-physics phenomena which must be accounted for in order to adequately model the biomechanical behavior of the complete organ. In this respect, a major focus of our work has been on formulating modeling ingredients which satisfy the most crucial thermomechanical requirements – in particular as regards energy balances – throughout the various forms of physical and scale-related couplings. This has led to a “beating heart” model for which some experimental and clinical validations have already been obtained. Concurrently, with the objective of building “patient-specific” heart models, we have formulated some original approaches inspired from data assimilation concepts to benefit from the available clinical data, with a particular concern for medical imaging. By combining the two fundamental sources of information represented by the model and the data, we are able to extract some most valuable quantitative knowledge on a given heart, e.g. as regards some uncertain constitutive parameter values characterizing a possible pathology, with important perspectives in diagnosis assistance. In addition, once the overall uncertainty has been adequately controlled via this adjustment process, the model can be expected to become “predictive”, hence should provide clinically-relevant quantitative information, both in the current state of the patient and under various scenarii of future evolutions, such as for therapy planning.