A first meshless approach to simulation of the elastic behaviour of the diaphragm

Abstract

The diaphragm is the main muscle that regulates the human respiration. When a patient is put under controlled mechanical ventilation, the diaphragm is exposed to forces that damage the muscle function. The long-term aim of this work is to study this process through numerical simulation. Here, we take the first steps in developing a meshless numerical simulation method for the diaphragm. We describe how the diaphragm geometry can be extracted from medical images, and then be used in the meshless method. We show that for a thin volume like the diaphragm, the resolution of the thin dimension is highly relevant for the accuracy of the approximation, and we also show that the method converges for a test case, where realistic displacements are used as boundary conditions.