Three-dimensional stress and strain in passive rabbit left ventricle: A model study

To determine regional stress and strain distributions in rabbit ventricular myocardium, an anatomically detailed finite element model was used to solv e the equations of stress equilibrium during passive filling of the left ve ntricle. Computations were conducted on a scalable parallel processing comp uter and performance was found to scale well with the number of processors used, so that stimulations previously requiring approximately 60 min were c ompleted in just over 5 min. Epicardial strains from the model analysis sho wed good agreement (RMSE=0.007332) with experimental measurements when mate rial properties were chosen such that cross fiber strain was more heterogen eous than fiber strain, which is also consistent with experimental observat ions in other species. (C) 2000 Biomedical Engineering Society, [S0090-6964 (00)00507-5].