Numerical approximation of cardiac electro-fluid-mechanical models

The mathematical modeling of the heart involves several challenges, which are intrinsically related to the complexity of its function. A satisfactory cardiac model must be able to describe a wide range of different processes, such as the evolution of the transmembrane potential in the myocardium, the deformation caused by the muscles contraction, and the dynamics of the blood inside the heart chambers. In this work, we focus on the coupling of the electrophysiology, the active and the passive mechanics, and the fluid dynamics of the blood in the left ventricle (LV) of the human heart. The models describing the previously mentioned processes are called “single core models”, and can be regarded as the building blocks of an “integrated model”. In this thesis, we first review the isolated single core mathematical models for the description of the LV function, and discuss their space and time discretizations with particular emphasis on the coupling conditions. We consider both implicit and semi-implicit schemes for the time discretization. The fully discretized single core problems thus obtained are then combined to define integrated electromechanics and electrofluidmechanics problems. We then focus on the numerical coupling strategy for the electromechanics solver in the framework of the active strain formulation. First, we propose a monolithic strategy where the discretized core models are solved simultaneously; then, several novel segregated strategies, where the discretized core models are solved sequentially, are proposed and systematically compared with each other. The segregated strategies are obtained by exploiting a Godunov splitting scheme, which introduces a first order error on the solution. We show that, while the monolithic approach is more accurate and more stable for relatively large timesteps, segregated approaches allow to solve the integrated problem much more efficiently in terms of computational resources. Moreover, with segregated approaches, it is possible to use different timesteps for the different core models in a staggered fashion, thus further improving the computational efficiency of the schemes. The monolithic and the segregated strategies for the electromechanics are used to solve a benchmark problem with idealized geometry: the results are then compared in terms of accuracy and efficiency. We numerically confirm that the segregated strategies are accurate at least of order one. In light of the results obtained, we employ the proposed strategies to simulate the electromechanics of a subject-specific LV for a full heartbeat. We simulate both healthy and pathological scenarios: in the latter case, we account for an ischemic necrosis of the tissue and analyze several clinical indicators such as pressure-volume loops and the end systolic pressure-volume relationship. Finally, we use the proposed strategies to simulate the electrofluidmechanics of a realistic LV during the systolic phase of the heartbeat. When defining the integrated cardiac models, we establish a preprocess pipeline aimed at preparing geometries and data for both idealized and subject-specific simulations. The pipeline is succesfully used for the setting up of large scale simulations in a high performance computing framework, where the (strong and weak) scalability of the proposed coupling strategies is assessed.