Performing physiologically relevant simulations of the beating heart in clinical context requires to develop detailed models of the microscale force generation process. These models, however, may reveal difficult to implement in practice due to their high computational costs and complex calibration. We propose a hierarchy of three interconnected muscle contraction models—from the more refined to the more simplified—that are rigorously and systematically related to each other, offering a way to select, for a specific application, the model that yields a good trade-off between physiological fidelity, computational cost and calibration complexity. The three model families are compared to the same set of experimental data to systematically assess what physiological indicators can be reproduced or not and how these indicators constrain the model parameters. Finally, we discuss the applicability of these models for heart simulation.

在临床环境中对跳动的心脏进行生理相关模拟需要开发微尺度力生成过程的详细模型。然而，由于它们的高计算成本和复杂的校准，这些模型可能在实践中难以实施。我们提出了三个相互关联的肌肉收缩模型的层次结构——从更精细到更简单——它们严格和系统地相互关联，提供了一种方法来为特定应用选择产生良好权衡的模型生理保真度、计算成本和校准复杂性之间的关系。将三个模型族与同一组实验数据进行比较，以系统地评估哪些生理指标可以重现，以及这些指标如何约束模型参数。最后，我们讨论了这些模型在心脏模拟中的适用性。