ABSTRACT
Current treatments of heart rhythm troubles require careful planning and guidance for optimal outcomes. Computational models of cardiac electrophysiology are being proposed for therapy planning but current approaches are either too simplified or too computationally intensive for patient-specific simulations in clinical practice. This paper presents a novel approach, LBM-EP, to solve any type of mono-domain cardiac electrophysiology models at near real-time that is especially tailored for patient-specific simulations. The domain is discretized on a Cartesian grid with a level-set representation of patient's heart geometry, previously estimated from images automatically. The cell model is calculated node-wise, while the transmembrane potential is diffused using Lattice-Boltzmann method within the domain defined by the level-set. Experiments on synthetic cases, on a data set from CESC'10 and on one patient with myocardium scar showed that LBM-EP provides results comparable to an FEM implementation, while being 10 - 45 times faster. Fast, accurate, scalable and requiring no specific meshing, LBM-EP paves the way to efficient and detailed models of cardiac electrophysiology for therapy planning.
Subject(s)
Action Potentials/physiology , Heart Conduction System/anatomy & histology , Heart Conduction System/physiology , Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted/methods , Imaging, Three-Dimensional/methods , Magnetic Resonance Imaging/methods , Models, Anatomic , Models, Cardiovascular , Computer Simulation , HumansABSTRACT
MitralClip is a novel minimally invasive procedure to treat mitral valve (MV) regurgitation. It consists in clipping the mitral leaflets together to close the regurgitant hole. A careful preoperative planning is necessary to select respondent patients and to determine the clipping sites. Although preliminary indications criteria are established, they lack prediction power with respect to complications and effectiveness of the therapy in specific patients. We propose an integrated framework for personalized simulation of MV function and apply it to simulate MitralClip procedure. A patient-specific dynamic model of the MV apparatus is computed automatically from 4D TEE images. A biomechanical model of the MV, constrained by the observed motion of the mitral annulus and papillary muscles, is employed to simulate valve closure and MitralClip intervention. The proposed integrated framework enables, for the first time, to quantitatively evaluate an MV finite-element model in-vivo, on eleven patients, and to predict the outcome of MitralClip intervention in one of these patients. The simulations are compared to ground truth and to postoperative images, resulting in promising accuracy (average point-to-mesh distance: 1.47 +/- 0.24 mm). Our framework may constitute a tool for MV therapy planning and patient management.
