npj Digital Medicine (Apr 2024)

Whole-heart electromechanical simulations using Latent Neural Ordinary Differential Equations

  • Matteo Salvador,
  • Marina Strocchi,
  • Francesco Regazzoni,
  • Christoph M. Augustin,
  • Luca Dede’,
  • Steven A. Niederer,
  • Alfio Quarteroni

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-024-01084-x
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 7, no. 1
pp. 1 – 8

Abstract

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Abstract Cardiac digital twins provide a physics and physiology informed framework to deliver personalized medicine. However, high-fidelity multi-scale cardiac models remain a barrier to adoption due to their extensive computational costs. Artificial Intelligence-based methods can make the creation of fast and accurate whole-heart digital twins feasible. We use Latent Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (LNODEs) to learn the pressure-volume dynamics of a heart failure patient. Our surrogate model is trained from 400 simulations while accounting for 43 parameters describing cell-to-organ cardiac electromechanics and cardiovascular hemodynamics. LNODEs provide a compact representation of the 3D-0D model in a latent space by means of an Artificial Neural Network that retains only 3 hidden layers with 13 neurons per layer and allows for numerical simulations of cardiac function on a single processor. We employ LNODEs to perform global sensitivity analysis and parameter estimation with uncertainty quantification in 3 hours of computations, still on a single processor.