A New Eikonal Solver for Cardiac Electrophysiology in LS-DYNA

Heart disease is among the leading causes of death in the western countries; hence, a deeper understanding of cardiac functioning will provide important insights for engineers and clinicians in treating cardiac pathologies. In this paper we will concentrate on electrophysiology (EP), which describes the propagation of the cell transmembrane potential in the heart. In LS-DYNA, EP can be coupled with solid and fluid mechanics for a multiphysics simulation of the heart, but pure EP is also often used to investigate complex phenomena such as cardiac arrhythmia or fibrillations. The gold standard model for EP is the “bi-domain” model, along with the slightly simplified “mono-domain”. These were introduced in LS-DYNA a few years ago [1]. They give very accurate predictions, but the associated computational expenses are significant, which can be an issue for patient-specific predictions, for example, cardiac activation patterns for complex procedures such as cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT).