Fast parameter inference in a biomechanical model of the left ventricle by using statistical emulation

Vinny Davies, Umberto Noè, Alan Lazarus, Hao Gao, Benn Macdonald, Colin Berry, Xiaoyu Luo, Dirk Husmeier*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract / Description of output

A central problem in biomechanical studies of personalized human left ventricular modelling is estimating the material properties and biophysical parameters from in vivo clinical measurements in a timeframe that is suitable for use within a clinic. Understanding these properties can provide insight into heart function or dysfunction and help to inform personalized medicine. However, finding a solution to the differential equations which mathematically describe the kinematics and dynamics of the myocardium through numerical integration can be computationally expensive. To circumvent this issue, we use the concept of emulation to infer the myocardial properties of a healthy volunteer in a viable clinical timeframe by using in vivo magnetic resonance image data. Emulation methods avoid computationally expensive simulations from the left ventricular model by replacing the biomechanical model, which is defined in terms of explicit partial differential equations, with a surrogate model inferred from simulations generated before the arrival of a patient, vastly improving computational efficiency at the clinic. We compare and contrast two emulation strategies: emulation of the computational model outputs and emulation of the loss between the observed patient data and the computational model outputs. These strategies are tested with two interpolation methods, as well as two loss functions. The best combination of methods is found by comparing the accuracy of parameter inference on simulated data for each combination. This combination, using the output emulation method, with local Gaussian process interpolation and the Euclidean loss function, provides accurate parameter inference in both simulated and clinical data, with a reduction in the computational cost of about three orders of magnitude compared with numerical integration of the differential equations by using finite element discretization techniques.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1555-1576
Number of pages22
JournalJournal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series C: Applied Statistics
Volume68
Issue number5
Early online date20 Sept 2019
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Nov 2019

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • emulation
  • Gaussian processes
  • Holzapfel–Ogden constitutive law
  • Left ventricle heart model
  • magnetic resonance imaging
  • optimization
  • simulation

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