Utility of simplified cardiac elasticity models in digital twins

Determine whether ad‑hoc simplified representations of cardiac myocardial elasticity—including transversely isotropic strain energy functions and orthotropic strain energy functions with reduced parameter sets—accurately reproduce experimentally measured myocardial mechanical data when employed for parameter identification and personalization in cardiac digital twin applications.

Background

The paper highlights that state-of-the-art orthotropic myocardial strain energy functions (SEF) often have many parameters, which complicates personalization in cardiac digital twins due to high parameter variance. In practice, ad-hoc simplifications are frequently adopted—such as transversely isotropic SEF or partially fitted orthotropic SEF—to make inverse parameter estimation feasible.

However, the authors explicitly note uncertainty about whether these simplified models faithfully reproduce measured stress–strain data across different experimental conditions. Addressing this question is central to evaluating the trade-off between personalizability and fidelity in digital twin models and motivates their development of CHESRA to generate low-complexity SEF that balance accuracy and simplicity.