Relationship between cardiac electrical and mechanical activation markers by coupling bidomain and deformation models

The aim of this study is to simulate the electromechanical behavior of a cardiac wedge following an endo- or epicardial stimulation, and to study different markers of mechanical contraction times. We investigate how tissue anisotropy affects the performance of the mechanical markers and we evaluate their delay distributions with respect to the electrical activation time. The main results of this study show that: the electrical and mechanical activation sequences are very well correlated; the electromechanical delay displays heterogeneous distributions even if the electrical and mechanical cellular properties are assumed homogeneous; the electromechanical delay is larger in the regions where depolarization proceeds along fiber than across fiber.