Structural modelling of the cardiovascular system

Computational modelling of the cardiovas- cular system offers much promise, but represents a truly interdisciplinary challenge, requiring knowledge of physiology, mechanics of materials, fluid dynamics and biochemistry. This paper aims to provide a sum- mary of the recent advances in cardiovascular structural modelling, including the numerical methods, main con- stitutive models and modelling procedures developed to represent cardiovascular structures and pathologies across a broad range of length and time scales; serv- ing as an accessible point of reference to newcomers to the field. The class of so-called hyperelastic materi- als provide the theoretical foundation for the modelling of how these materials deform under load, and so an overview of these models is provided; comparing clas- sical to application-specific phenomenological models. The physiology is split into components and pathologies of the cardiovascular system and linked back to con- stitutive modelling developments, identifying current state-of-the-art in modelling procedures from both clin- ical and engineering sources. Models which have orig- inally been derived for one application and scale are shown to be used for an increasing range and for simi- lar applications. The trend for such approaches is dis- cussed in the context of increasing availability of high performance computing resources, where in some cases computer hardware can impact the choice of modelling approach used.