Stanley Corrsin Award Lecture I: A multi-physics model of the human heart: an immersed-boundary implementation

Building a computational model of the human heart is a formidable task as it involves very complex geometries, the dynamics of deforming biological tissues, the transitional and turbulent hemodynamics, the myocardium electrophysiology, the strong multi-way interaction of all these systems and the heart connection with the main arteries and veins. Furthermore, in order for the model to be predictive, hundreds of million degrees of freedom are necessary and, even on supercomputers, they require simulation times of weeks or months, thus preventing the routine use of these models.

Immersed-boundary methods are very advantageous for this class of problems since they can cope with complex deforming domains while retaining the ease and efficiency of simple meshes. This allows also to exploit the latest GPU-acceleration technologies thus reproducing the full cardiac dynamics within a few hours.

This innovative approach makes possible a systematic use of virtual models in cardiovascular research, thus reducing the extensive use of in–vivo experiments with their economical and ethical implications.