Martonová D (2024)
Publication Language: English
Publication Type: Thesis
Publication year: 2024
URI: https://www.ltd.tf.fau.de/files/2024/05/dissertation-denisa-martonova.pdf
Nowadays, computational modelling and simulation have become powerful
tools in medical sciences due to their considerable potential to assist clinicians
in diagnosing the source of a disease, the kind of a therapy, or in training for a
surgical operation. The focus of this thesis is on modelling and simulation of
cardiac electromechanics. The importance is highlighted by the fact that cardiovascular
diseases are currently the main cause of death worldwide. Despite
rapid development in the last decades, cardiac modelling and simulations are
still the subject of intensive research. It remains a challenging task to create
an efficient computational heart model including all necessary ingredients.
The overall aim of the present doctoral thesis is to develop a robust and accurate
computational model of rat cardiac electromechanics, which is calibrated with
experimental data. This cumulative thesis is presented as a compilation of six
journal publications and one conference proceeding, which are grouped into
four research contribution parts. To begin, the work is focused on creating
a novel material model for passive cardiac mechanics. It is calibrated with
experimental data in healthy rat cardiac tissue and in tissue 14 days after
an induced myocardial infarction. The simulation results using the derived
parameters show a close agreement with the experimental data. Then, using
the suggested model and the determined parameters, it is studied how a
weakened heart, suffering from a restrictive cardiomyopathy, may be supported
from the outside by applying an external support pressure. Based on the
simulation model, the optimal support pressure needed for the restoration
of the healthy left-ventricular ejection fraction and end-diastolic volume is
computed for different stages of ventricular fibrosis. Further, apart from
the improvements on the material modelling level, the thesis focuses on a
novel numerical method for the simulation of cardiac mechanics, i.e. multiple
smoothed finite element methods are extended for the modelling and simulation
of active cardiac contraction. It turned out that the method is very suitable
for the simulation of the cardiac cycle. This is due to its ability to significantly
reduce the volumetric locking problem, being present when large deformations
occur, nearly incompressible material is utilised and the computational domain
is discretised with tetrahedrons. Finally, in addition to the continuum approach
on the organ-scale level, a cell-scale level two-state receptor binding model is
established to investigate the influence of diverse hormone secretion patterns
as well as to determine the optimal drug dose in order to restore the reference
cellular responsiveness, being decreased under various pathological conditions.
A possible inclusion into the established heart model is discussed.
APA:
Martonová, D. (2024). Computational modelling and simulation of rat heart electromechanics – from (smoothed) finite element methods towards a ligand-receptor model (Dissertation).
MLA:
Martonová, Denisa. Computational modelling and simulation of rat heart electromechanics – from (smoothed) finite element methods towards a ligand-receptor model. Dissertation, 2024.
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