Cardiac mechanical parameter calibration based on the unscented transform.

Patient-specific cardiac modelling can help in understanding pathophysiology and predict therapy planning. However it requires to personalize the model geometry, kinematics, electrophysiology and mechanics. Calibration aims at providing global values (space invariant) of parameters before performing the personalization stage which involves solving an inverse problem to find regional values. We propose an automatic calibration method of the mechanical parameters of the Bestel-Clément-Sorine (BCS) electromechanical model of the heart based on the Unscented Transform algorithm. A sensitivity analysis is performed that reveals which observations on the volume and pressure evolution are significant to characterize the global behaviour of the myocardium. We show that the calibration method gives satisfying results by optimizing up to 7 parameters of the BCS model in only one iteration. This method was evaluated on 7 volunteers and 2 heart failure patients, with a mean relative error from the real data of 11%. This calibration enabled furthermore a preliminary study of the specific parameters to the studied pathologies.