pyheart-lib: A Python Library for LS-DYNA Multi-physics Heart Simulations.

Phyisics-based computer simulations of the heart have huge potential in the medical device industry and clinical practice, for instance to accelerate and improve device designs, assist clinical decision making, or guide treatment planning. For heart simulations the importance of modeling choices with respect to electrophysiology, the structural behavior of the cardiac tissue, the dynamics of blood flow, and their respective coupling strongly depend on the application of interest. LS-DYNA is a finite element solution that offers the necessary multi-physics capabilities and features for heart modeling. Nevertheless, setting up these models and obtaining physiological results is still highly manual and can be cumbersome. Therefore, in this paper we propose a python-based high-level interface to LS-DYNA, that will be free-to-use and dedicated to heart modeling. We introduce the relevant heart modeling features that are available and introduce the modular python library to set up and drive these simulations. Consequently, two example models are presented: a full heart model of electrophysiology and a bi-ventricular model of cardiac mechanics.