Using the Heat Method to Model CardiacActivation Times

Francisco Sahli Costabal1 and Simone Pezzuto2
1Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, iHealth, 2University of Trento


Abstract

Cardiac activation mapping requires computing wavefront arrival times on patient-specific geometries with fiber anisotropy, often from multiple stimulation sites firing at different times. The heat method computes geodesic distances via two symmetric positive-definite (SPD) linear solves, but is designed for isotropic media and only supports a single activation time. We extend the heat method to handle both anisotropic conduction tensors and heterogeneous Dirichlet conditions by connecting the eikonal-diffusion equation to a screened Poisson problem. We call the resulting algorithm the multi-front heat method. Both linear systems remain SPD, enabling fast Cholesky or algebraic multigrid solvers. On a 2D anisotropic ring with five activation sites, the method achieves 5.5% relative L2 error against a monodomain reference, compared to 8.1% for the fast iterative method. On a 3D left-ventricular mesh (111K nodes) with fiber-based 3:1 anisotropy and three activation sites, it achieves 7.2% error versus 13.1\% for FIM, with an solve time of 2.1 s. The proposed method offers a competitive alternative for the fast simulation of cardiac activation times.