Modeling and Simulation of Growth in Diastolic Heart Failure

Heart failure is one of the cardiovascular diseases that causes changes in the structure of the heart and reduces the output of the heart. This disease can be divided into two categories: diastolic and systolic heart failure. In diastolic heart failure, the thickness of the ventricular walls increased and is associated with concentric hypertrophy. In this study, concentric hypertrophy is considered to be caused by pressure overload, as a result of which, the number of sarcomeres increases in parallel, and as a result, causes a relative increase in the transverse area of the cardiomyocytes. Continuum equations of concentric hypertrophy by using an idealized biventricular geometry have been implemented in COMSOL Multiphysics software, the approach presented for implementing the equations is completely new and has fundamental advantages over the implementation of the previous approach, and does not require coding and can be easily implemented in a finite element software. The results of the simulation showed that the thickness of the ventricular walls increases and the volume of the ventricular chambers decreases. The mentioned results are consistent with the clinical observations of the disease and shows that computational modeling can be used as a powerful tool to increase specialist’s knowledge of diseases that have a high mortality rate.