Adaptive integration of history variables in constrained mixture models for organ-scale growth and remodeling

Abstract

In the last decades, many computational models have been developed to predict soft tissue growth and remodeling (G&R). The constrained mixture theory describes fundamental mechanobiological processes in soft tissue G&R and has been widely adopted in cardiovascular models of G&R. However, even after two decades of work, large organ-scale models are rare, mainly due to high computational costs (model evaluation and memory consumption), especially in long-range simulations. We propose two strategies to adaptively integrate history variables in constrained mixture models to enable large organ-scale simulations of G&R. Both strategies exploit that the influence of deposited tissue on the current mixture decreases over time through degradation. One strategy is independent of external loading, allowing the estimation of the computational resources ahead of the simulation. The other adapts the history snapshots based on the local mechanobiological environment so that the additional integration errors can be controlled and kept negligibly small, even in G&R scenarios with severe perturbations. We analyze the adaptively integrated constrained mixture model on a tissue patch for a parameter study and show the performance under different G&R scenarios. To confirm that adaptive strategies enable large organ-scale examples, we show simulations of different hypertension conditions with a real-world example of a biventricular heart discretized with a finite element mesh. In our example, adaptive integrations sped up simulations by a factor of three and reduced memory requirements to one-sixth. The reduction of the computational costs gets even more pronounced for simulations over longer periods. Adaptive integration of the history variables allows studying more finely resolved models and longer G&R periods while computational costs are drastically reduced and largely constant in time.