A posteriori error estimator for model adaptivity in electrocardiology

We introduce an a posteriori modeling error estimator for the effective computation of electric potential propagation in the heart. Starting from the Bidomain problem and an extended formulation of the simplified Monodomain system, we build a hybrid model, called Hybridomain, which is dynamically adapted to be either Bi- or Monodomain ones in different regions of the computational domain according to the error estimator. We show that accurate results can be obtained with the adaptive Hybridomain model with a reduced computational cost compared to the full Bidornain model. We discuss the effectivity of the estimator and the reliability of the results on simulations performed on real human left ventricle geometries retrieved from healthy subjects. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.