Effects of mechano-electric feedbacks on the cardiac bioelectrical activity

The aim of this talk is to present the results of numerical simulations focusing on the effects of myocardial deformation due to muscle contraction on the bioelectrical activity of the cardiac tissue.

The three-dimensional cardiac electro-mechanical model adopted consists of the following four components:

• the quasi-static anisotropic finite elasticity equations for the deformation of the cardiac tissue;
• the active tension model for the intracellular calcium dynamics and cross-bridge binding;
• the anisotropic Bidomain model for the electrical current flow through the tissue;
• the membrane model of ventricular myocytes, including stretch-activated channels.

In order to take properly into account the mechano-electric feedbacks (MEFs), the electrical current flow is described by the Bidomain model on the deformed tissue. The numerical simulations are based on our finite element parallel solver, which employs Multilevel Additive Schwarz preconditioners for the solution of the linear systems arising from the discretization of the Bidomain equations and Newton-Krylov-BDDC methods for the solution of the non-linear systems arising from the discretization of the finite elasticity equations.

Simone Scacchi is currently associate professor of numerical analysis at the University of Milan, Italy. He received the Ph.D. degree in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Pavia in 2008. His research interests focus on: numerical methods for partial differential equations, domain decomposition methods, computational electrocardiology, computational mechanics and isogeometric analsys.