Toward Patient-Specific Myocardial Models of the Heart

This article presents a framework for building patient-specific models of the myocardium, to help diagnosis, therapy planning, and procedure guidance. The aim is to be able to introduce such models in clinical applications. Thus, there is a need to design models that can be adjusted from clinical data, images, or signals, which are sparse and noisy. The authors describe the three main components of a myocardial model: the anatomy, the electrophysiology, and the biomechanics. For each of these components, the authors try to obtain the best balance between prior knowledge and observable parameters to be able to adjust these models to patient data. To achieve this, there is a need to design models with the right level of complexity and a computational cost compatible with clinical constraints.