An Anisotropic Fluid-Solid Model of the Mouse Heart

Area of Science:

• Computational fluid dynamics
• Biomechanical modeling
• Medical imaging analysis

Background:

• Spatial discretization of complex fluid-solid geometries from imaging is a major challenge in biomechanical simulations.
• Ensuring geometric and topological compatibility between fluid and solid phases, especially at Lagrangian interfaces, is crucial for simulation accuracy.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and apply a novel automated approach for generating compatible, high-fidelity 3D fluid-solid meshes from medical imaging data.
• To create an efficient and accurate computational model of the mouse heart for fluid-structure interaction (FSI) analysis.

Main Methods:

• Segmentation of a 50-micron isotropic MRI dataset of a mouse heart using a customized multimaterial connected fuzzy thresholding algorithm.
• Generation of compatible isosurfaces using a multimaterial marching cubes algorithm, followed by volume-conserving smoothing.
• Application of automated meshing algorithms to create anisotropic hybrid meshes with specified boundary layers and element anisotropy.

Main Results:

• Successfully generated a highly detailed, 3D fluid-solid mesh of the mouse heart, including intricate structures like chordae and coronary vasculature.
• The resulting meshes are scale-invariant within materials and feature boundary layer prisms, ensuring equilibrated relative error in FSI computations.
• The automated approach significantly enhances efficiency, optimizing computational resource utilization for simulations.

Conclusions:

• The developed method provides a robust solution for creating compatible fluid-solid meshes from complex biological geometries.
• This approach enables highly accurate and efficient biomechanical simulations, advancing the study of organ dynamics and fluid-structure interactions.
• The automated meshing technique represents a significant step forward in computational modeling for cardiovascular research.