Modeling the Chemoelectromechanical Behavior of Skeletal Muscle Using the Parallel Open-Source Software Library OpenCMISS

Abstract

An extensible, flexible, multiscale, and multiphysics model for nonisometric skeletal muscle behavior is presented. The skeletal muscle chemoelectromechanical model is based on a bottom-up approach modeling the entire excitation-contraction pathway by strongly coupling a detailed biophysical model of a half-sarcomere to the propagation of action potentials along skeletal muscle fibers and linking cellular parameters to a transversely isotropic continuum-mechanical constitutive equation describing the overall mechanical behavior of skeletal muscle tissue. Since the multiscale model exhibits separable time scales, a special emphasis is placed on employing computationally efficient staggered solution schemes. Further, the implementation builds on the open-source software library OpenCMISS and uses state-of-the-art parallelization techniques taking advantage of the unique anatomical fiber architecture of skeletal muscles. OpenCMISS utilizes standardized data structures for geometrical aspects (FieldML) and cellular models (CellML). Both standards are designed to allow for a maximum flexibility, reproducibility, and extensibility. The results demonstrate the model’s capability of simulating different aspects of nonisometric muscle contraction and efficiently simulating the chemoelectromechanical behavior in complex skeletal muscles such as the tibialis anterior muscle.