Modelagem quantitativa da eletromecânica do tecido cardíaco humano

Abstract

Cardiac diseases are associated with high mortality rates around the globe. With this in mind, cardiac computational modeling has become an important tool to support the test of new drugs, the development of new devices and of diagnostic techniques. The objective of this work is the study and development of new models for the electromechanical coupling of heart cells and tissues, in particular the left ventricle, which is the main structure responsible for pumping blood to the body. This work can be divided in two main steps: 1) The development of a new model for the electromechanics of human left ventricle cardiac myocytes, based on the coupling of two existing models, one for the electrophysiology and another for the myofilament active force generation. On the development of this model optimization techniques like genetic algorithms where used for the parameter adjustment to reproduce the few experimental data available in the literature. 2) This model was embedded in larger scale electromechanical simulations, i.e. tissue level. This work treats the numerical and methodological problems that this coupling brings. Furthermore, we analyze the influence of the mechanical deformation in important eletrophysiological features, such as the waveform of ventricular electrograms.