Continuum Mechanics and Mechanical Cardiac Models

Cardiac models that depend only on geometrical representation of the heart face the possibility of producing unreasonable results of the heart function and deformation, especially in the case of low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), imaging artifacts, or lack of sufcient texture or contrast in the image. The incorporation of realistic mechanical modeling in cardiac image analysis ensures that the generated deformation maps represent realistic heart function. Computational models of the heart have been developed based on geometry (Nielsen et al. 1991, Hooks et al. 2002), microstructure (Legrice et al. 1997), material properties (Hunter et  al. 1998, Dokos et  al. 2002), and electrophysiology (Pollard and Barr 1991, ten Tusscher et al. 2004, Trayanova 2006).