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 solve the equations of stress equilibrium during passive filling of the left ventricle. Computations were conducted on a scalable parallel processing computer and performance was found to scale well with the number of processors used, so that stimulations previously requiring approximately 60 min were completed in just over 5 min. Epicardial strains from the model analysis showed good agreement (RMSE = 0.007332) with experimental measurements when material properties were chosen such that cross fiber strain was more heterogeneous than fiber strain, which is also consistent with experimental observations in other species.