Mass-Spring Model for Simulation of Heart Valve Tissue Mechanical Behavior

Heart valves are functionally complex, making surgical repair difficult. Simulation-based surgical planning could facilitate repair, but current finite element (FE) studies are prohibitively slow for rapid, clinically oriented simulations. Mass-spring (M-S) models are fast but can be inaccurate. We quantify speed and accuracy differences between an anisotropic, nonlinear M-S and an efficient FE membrane model for simulating both biaxial and pressure loading of aortic valve (AV) leaflets. The FE model incurs approximately 10 times the computational cost of the M-S model. For simulated biaxial loading, mean error in normal strains is