Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Commons^™

A Fully Coupled Model For Electromechanics Of The Heart, Henian Xia, Kwai Wong, Xiaopeng Zhao

Faculty Publications and Other Works -- Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering

We present a fully coupled electromechanical model of the heart. The model integrates cardiac electrophysiology and cardiac mechanics through excitation-induced contraction and deformation-induced current. Numerical schemes based on finite element were implemented in a supercomputer. Numerical examples were presented using a thin cardiac tissue and a dog ventricle with realistic geometry. Performance of the parallel simulation scheme was studied. The model provides a useful tool to understand cardiovascular dynamics.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/927279

A Shooting Algorithm For Complex Immunodominance Control Problems, Xiaopeng Zhao, R Yang, M Zhang

Faculty Publications and Other Works -- Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering

Although T cells are able to recognize a wide variety of target peptides, they are often strongly focused on a few of the peptides and leave the rest of them unattended. This phenomenon of strongly biased immune response is known as immunodominance. Mathematically, an immunodominance problem can be formulated using optimal control principles as a two-point boundary-value problem. The solution of this problem is challenging especially when the control variables are bounded. In this work, we develop a numerical algorithm based on the shooting technique for bounded optimal control problems. The algorithm is applied to a group of immunodominance problems. …