Multi-scale modeling and coupling mechanisms for biomechanical systems, with mathematical and numerical analysis
Over the past decade, we have laid out the foundations of a multi-scale 3D model of the cardiac mechanical contraction responding to electrical activation. Several collaborations have been crucial in this enterprise, see below references. By integrating this formulation with adapted numerical methods, we are now able to represent the whole organ behavior in interaction with the blood during complete heart beats. This subject was our first achievement to combine the deep understanding of the underlying physics and physiology and our constant concern of proposing well-posed mathematical formulations and adequate numerical discretizations. In fact, we have shown that our model satisfies the essential thermo-mechanical laws, and in particular the energy balance, and proposed compatible numerical schemes that — in consequence — can be rigorously analyzed, see (Chapelle et al. IJMCE 2012). In the same spirit, we have recently formulated a poromechanical model adapted to the blood perfusion in the heart, hence precisely taking into account the large deformation of the mechanical medium, the fluid inertia and moving domain, and so that the energy balance between fluid and solid is fulfilled from the model construction to its discretization, see (Chapelle and Moireau EJMB 2014).
Inverse problems with actual data — Fundamental formulation, mathematical analysis and applications
A major challenge in the context of biomechanical modeling — and more generally in modeling for life sciences — lies in using the large amount of data available on the system to circumvent the lack of absolute modeling ground truth, since every system considered is in fact patient-specific, with possibly non-standard conditions associated with a disease. We have already developed original strategies for solving this particular type of inverse problems by adopting the observer stand-point. The idea we proposed consists in incorporating to the classical discretization of the mechanical system an estimator filter that can use the data to improve the quality of the global approximation, and concurrently identify some uncertain parameters possibly related to a diseased state of the patient, see (Moireau et al. CMAME 2008), (Moireau et al. IP 2009) & (Moireau and Chapelle COCV 2011). Therefore, our strategy leads to a coupled model-data system solved similarly to a usual PDE-based model, with a computational cost directly comparable to classical Galerkin approximations. We have already worked on the formulation, the mathematical and numerical analysis of the resulting system — see (Chapelle et al. M3AS 2012) — and the demonstration of the capabilities of this approach in the context of identification of constitutive parameters for a heart model with real data, including medical imaging, see (Chabiniok et al. BMMB 2012).
Clinical applications
After several validation steps — based on clinical and experimental data — we have reached the point of having validated the heart model in a pre-clinical context where we have combined direct and inverse modeling in order to bring predictive answers on specific patient states. For example, we have demonstrated the predictive ability of our model to set up pacemaker devices for a specific patient in cardiac resynchronization therapies, see (Sermesant et al. MIA 2012). We have also used our parametric estimation procedure to provide a quantitative characterization of an infarct in a clinical experiment performed with pigs, see (Chabiniok et al. BMMB 2012).