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How viscous is the beating heart? Insights from a computational study

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Abstract

Understanding tissue rheology is critical to accurately model the human heart. While the elastic properties of cardiac tissue have been extensively studied, its viscous properties remain an issue of ongoing debate. Here we adopt a viscoelastic version of the classical Holzapfel Ogden model to study the viscous timescales of human cardiac tissue. We perform a series of simulations and explore stress–relaxation curves, pressure–volume loops, strain profiles, and ventricular wall strains for varying viscosity parameters. We show that the time window for model calibration strongly influences the parameter identification. Using a four-chamber human heart model, we observe that, during the physiologically relevant time scales of the cardiac cycle, viscous relaxation has a negligible effect on the overall behavior of the heart. While viscosity could have important consequences in pathological conditions with compromised contraction or relaxation properties, we conclude that, for simulations within the physiological range of a human heart beat, we can reasonably approximate the human heart as hyperelastic.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge support through the NSF Grant SI2-SSI 1663671 ‘The SimCardio open source multi-physics cardiac modeling package’ and the NIH Grant R01 HL131823 ‘A new framework for understanding the mechanisms of diastolic dysfunction’.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Oğuz Ziya Tikenoğulları & Ellen Kuhl

  2. Department of Mechanical and Metallurgical Engineering and Institute for Biological and Medical Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Francisco Sahli Costabal

  3. Dassault Systèmes Simulia Corporation, Johnston, RI, USA

    Jiang Yao

  4. Departments of Pediatrics and Bioengineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Alison Marsden

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  1. Oğuz Ziya Tikenoğulları
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Correspondence to Ellen Kuhl.

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Tikenoğulları, O.Z., Costabal, F.S., Yao, J. et al. How viscous is the beating heart? Insights from a computational study. Comput Mech 70, 565–579 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00466-022-02180-z

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