Strain-Based Regional Nonlinear Cardiac Material Properties Estimation from Medical Images

Model personalization is essential for model-based surgical planning and treatment assessment. As alteration in material elasticity is a fundamental cause to various cardiac pathologies, estimation of material properties is important to model personalization. Although the myocardium is heterogeneous, hyperelastic, and orthotropic, existing image-based estimation frameworks treat the tissue as either heterogeneous but linear, or hyperelastic but homogeneous. In view of these, we present a physiology-based framework for estimating regional, hyperelastic, and orthotropic material properties. A cardiac physiological model is adopted to describe the macroscopic cardiac physiology. By using a strain-based objective function which properly reflects the change of material constants, the regional material properties of a hyperelastic and orthotropic constitutive law are estimated using derivative-free optimization. Experiments were performed on synthetic and real data to show the characteristics of the framework.