Visual simulation of cardiac beating motion with shape matching dynamics

A shape matching dynamics (SMD) is a robust and efficient elastic model based on geometric constraints. This article introduces our study [1] that adopts SMD to visual simulation of cardiac beating motion. In our technique, a heart is represented by a tetrahedral mesh model and a local region is defined at each vertex by connecting its immediate neighbors. During the simulation, we first contract all local regions depending on predefined muscle fiber orientations and contraction rate. Then using SMD, we compute the global shape of the heart model so that it satisfies the contracted local regions. Our technique introduces a fiber-orientation-dependent weighting function to emulate an anisotropic stiffness of myocardium. Since our technique is based on SMD, it is possible to compute cardiac motion in real-time on a commercially available PC.