An open tool based on lifex for myofibers generation in cardiac computational models

TL;DR

This paper introduces lifex, a high-performance open-source Finite Element solver for multi-physics cardiac modeling, featuring a novel myocardial fiber generator based on Laplace-Dirichlet Rule-Based Methods, aimed at broad accessibility and research flexibility.

Contribution

It presents the first publicly available lifex package with an innovative myocardial fiber generator, enhancing reproducibility and customization in whole-heart cardiac simulations.

Findings

Lifex enables accessible, high-performance cardiac simulations.

The fiber generator improves modeling accuracy for electrophysiological studies.

Extensive documentation supports new user integration.

Abstract

Modeling the whole cardiac function involves the solution of several complex multi-physics and multi-scale models that are highly computationally demanding, which call for simpler yet accurate, high-performance computational tools. Despite the efforts made by several research groups, no software for whole-heart fully-coupled cardiac simulations in the scientific community has reached full maturity yet. In this work we present the first publicly released package of lifex, a high-performance Finite Element solver for multi-physics and multi-scale problems developed in the framework of the iHEART project. The goal of lifex is twofold. On the one side, it aims at making in silico experiments easily reproducible and accessible to a wide community of users, including those with a background in medicine or bio-engineering. On the other hand, as an academic research library lifex can be exploited by scientific computing experts to explore new mathematical models and numerical methods within a robust development framework. lifex has been developed with a modular structure and will be released bundled in different modules. The tool presented here proposes an innovative generator for myocardial fibers based on Laplace-Dirichlet Rule-Based Methods, which are the essential building blocks for modeling the electrophysiological, mechanical and electromechanical cardiac function, from single-chamber to whole-heart simulations. This report comes with an extensive technical and mathematical documentation to welcome new users to the core structure of a prototypical lifex application and to provide them with a possible approach to include the generated cardiac fibers into more sophisticated computational pipelines.