Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the leading cause of mortality today. This work, therefore, aims at developing a framework for modeling CVDs, and we present both a three-dimensional growth model of a human saccular cerebral aneurysm and an electromechanically coupled model of the heart.
We investigate the effect of anisotropy in vascular layers upon the mechanical response in human saccular cerebral aneurysm during growth and remodeling and we present the constituents needed for the numerical implementation of a structurally-based constitutive law describing the behavior of passive myocardium and the tensors needed for implementing active contraction. A model framework of the left ventricle (LV) is presented, where we use lumped parameter models to simulate physiologically realistic LV pressure changes in response to the contracting heart. The increase in fiber dispersion, often associated with cardiac pathophysiology, is investigated using a novel approach to model the dispersion of both the myocyte fiber and sheet orientations and this formulation is extended to include a dispersed active contraction. Theoretical considerations on the mathematical and physical motivation for tension/compression fiber switching in dispersion is also investigated.