Importance of material parameters and strain energy function on the wall stresses in the left ventricle

Patient-specific estimates of the stress distribution in the left ventricles (LV) may have important applications for therapy planning, but computing the stress generally requires knowledge of the material behaviour. The passive stress-strain relation of myocardial tissue has been characterized by a number of models, but material parameters (MPs) remain difficult to estimate. The aim of this study is to implement a zero-pressure algorithm to reconstruct numerically the stress distribution in the LV without precise knowledge of MPs. We investigate the sensitivity of the stress distribution to variations in the different sets of constitutive parameters. We show that the sensitivity of the LV stresses to MPs can be marginal for an isotropic constitutive model. However, when using a transversely isotropic exponential strain energy function, the LV stresses become sensitive to MPs, especially to the linear elastic coefficient before the exponential function. This indicates that in-vivo identification efforts should focus mostly on this MP for the development of patient-specific finite-element analysis.