Finite Element Method Based Modeling of Cardiac Deformation Estimation under Abnormal Ventricular Muscle Conditions

Deformation modeling of cardiac muscle is an important issue in the field of cardiac analysis. Many approaches have been developed to better estimate the cardiac muscle deformation, and to obtain a practical model to be used in diagnostic procedures. But there are some conditions, like in case of myocardial infarction, in which the regular modeling approaches are not useful. In this article, using a point-wise approach, we try to estimate the deformation under some abnormal conditions of cardiac muscle. First, the endocardial and epicardial contour points are ordered with respect to the center of gravity of the endocardial contour and displacement vectors of boundary points are extracted. Then to solve the governing equations of the deformation, which is an elliptic equation, we apply boundary conditions in accordance with the computed displacement vectors and then the Finite Element method (FEM) will be used to solve the governing equations. Using the obtained displacement field of the cardiac muscle, strain map is extracted to show the mechanical behavior of the cardiac muscle. Several tests are conducted using phantom and real cardiac data in order to show the validity of the proposed method.