Development of a pipeline for patientspecific finite element modelling of the left ventricle of the human heart

Sammanfattning: In order to perform simulations of the human heart using a heart finite element solver developed at the Computational Technology Laboratory at KTH with a data set provided by Philips consisting of surface meshes of a whole heart, the surface mesh has to be converted to a volume mesh. The conversion is manual and time consuming. Therefore the purpose of this thesis is to develop algorithms and software tools for automatic generation of a finite element model in the form of a volume mesh of the left ventricle of a human heart based on the available Philips data set. The developed model can be used for the simulation of blood flow by solving the Navier–Stokes equations. The method used for generating the model is based on deformation of an a priori finite element volume mesh to fit the extracted inner wall surface mesh of the left ventricle, from the aforementioned data set. The deformation is done by solving a nonlinear partial differential equation (PDE) using the finite element method. The method starts with the characterization of an external field that describes the distance from the target surface mesh, and then uses this external field as a component of the total force responsible for deforming the object. The method is validated in three space dimension by deforming a sphere into an ellipsoid. For this test case, two implementations of the PDE were tested and evaluated. The method was then applied to the above mentioned Philips data set. The report summarizes the findings and proposes improvements for the future work