Thermo-electrical equivalents for simulating the electro-mechanical behavior of biological tissue.

Equivalence is one of most popular techniques to simulate the behavior of systems governed by the same type of differential equation. In this case, a thermo-electrical equivalence is considered as a method for modelling the inter-dependence of electrical and mechanical phenomena in biological tissue. We seek to assess this approach for multi-scale models (from micro-structure to tissue scale) of biological media, such as nerve cells and cardiac tissue, in which the electrical charge distribution is modelled as a heat distribution in an equivalent thermal system. This procedure allows for the reduction in problem complexity and it facilitates the coupling of electrical and mechanical phenomena in an efficient and practical way. Although the findings of this analysis are mainly addressed towards the electro-mechanics of tissue within the biomedical domain, the same approach could be used in other studies in which a coupled finite element analysis is required.