A novel 3D-shell electromechanical model of the left atrium offers superior robustness and computational efficiency over standard full 3D models.
The thin-walled nature of the atrial myocardium can lead to artificial stiffening when full 3D electromechanical models are discretized using standard finite elements. In this work, we propose an electromechanical model of the left atrium based on a 3D-shell formulation that overcomes these limitations. The model incorporates both passive and active components of atrial tissue mechanics, while atrioventricular interaction is represented by coupling the atrial model with a 0D electromechanical model of the left ventricle. The proposed approach is assessed under physiological and pathological conditions and systematically compared with the standard full 3D formulation. The results point out the superior robustness and computational efficiency of the proposed 3D-shell formulation.
Ruz et al. (Thu,) studied this question.