Open Access

Fatemeh Chegini, Alena Kopanicakova, Rolf Krause, Martin Weiser

• Aims. Detection and quantification of myocardial scars are helpful both for diagnosis of heart diseases and for building personalized simulation models. Scar tissue is generally charac­terized by a different conduction of electrical excitation. We aim at estimating conductivity-related parameters from endocardial mapping data, in particular the conductivity tensor. Solving this inverse problem requires computationally expensive monodomain simulations on fine discretizations. Therefore, we aim at accelerating the estimation using a multilevel method combining electrophysiology models of different complexity, namely the mono­domain and the eikonal model. Methods. Distributed parameter estimation is performed by minimizing the misfit between simulated and measured electrical activity on the endocardial surface, subject to the mono­domain model and regularization, leading to a constrained optimization problem. We formulate this optimization problem, including the modeling of scar tissue and different regularizations, and design an efficient iterative solver. We consider monodomain grid hierarchies and monodomain-eikonal model hierarchies in a recursive multilevel trust-region method. Results. From several numerical examples, both the efficiency of the method and the estimation quality, depending on the data, are investigated. The multilevel solver is significantly faster than a comparable single level solver. Endocardial mapping data of realistic density appears to be just sufficient to provide quantitatively reasonable estimates of location, size, and shape of scars close to the endocardial surface. Conclusion. In several situations, scar reconstruction based on eikonal and monodomain models differ significantly, suggesting the use of the more accurate but more expensive monodomain model for this purpose. Still, eikonal models can be utilized to accelerate the computations considerably, enabling the use of complex electrophysiology models for estimating myocardial scars from endocardial mapping data.