Introduction: Despite significant advances in cardiac modeling, the computational demands of electromechanical simulations continue to limit their clinical translation. We introduce the MMS model, a biophysically-constrained reduced-order formulation that achieves substantial computational efficiency without compromising physiological accuracy.
Objective: To develop and validate a minimal cardiac electromechanical model that faithfully reproduces action potential morphology, calcium handling dynamics, and active tension generation while demonstrating superior computational performance relative to established biophysical models.
Methods: The proposed model integrates: (1) a modified Bueno-Orovio electrophysiology framework, (2) phenomenological calcium dynamics, and (3) simplified active tension generation. Parameter optimization employed a multi-objective genetic algorithm to match ToR-Ord-Land outputs. Validation included 3D electromechanical simulations on a hexahedral mesh (6,859 nodes) using GPU-accelerated finite element methods.
Results:
MMS demonstrated excellent agreement with the reference model (mean error <4% across all outputs) while achieving a 6.5x overall speedup. The ODE solver showed particular efficiency 290x faster), enabling larger time steps (0.05 ms vs 0.001 ms) without loss of numerical stability.Conclusion: This work establishes MMS as a computationally efficient alternative for cardiac electromechanical simulations, successfully balancing model complexity with physiological fidelity. The demonstrated performance gains enable practical applications in whole-organ modeling and clinical translation.