Center for Devices and Radiological Health, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Silver Spring, Maryland, USA; Computational Biology Group, Oxford University, UK.
Int J Numer Method Biomed Eng. 2014 May;30(5):525-44. doi: 10.1002/cnm.2615. Epub 2013 Nov 20.
For computational models of cardiac activity to be used in safety-critical clinical decision-making, thorough and rigorous testing of the accuracy of predictions is required. The field of 'verification, validation and uncertainty quantification' has been developed to evaluate the credibility of computational predictions. The first stage, verification, is the evaluation of how well computational software correctly solves the underlying mathematical equations. The aim of this paper is to introduce novel methods for verifying multi-cellular electro-physiological solvers, a crucial first stage for solvers to be used with confidence in clinical applications. We define 1D-3D model problems with exact solutions for each of the monodomain, bidomain, and bidomain-with-perfusing-bath formulations of cardiac electro-physiology, which allow for the first time the testing of cardiac solvers against exact errors on fully coupled problems in all dimensions. These problems are carefully constructed so that they can be easily run using a general solver and can be used to greatly increase confidence that an implementation is correct, which we illustrate by testing one major solver, 'Chaste', on the problems. We then perform case studies on calculation verification (also known as solution verification) for two specific applications. We conclude by making several recommendations regarding verification in cardiac modelling.
为了使心脏活动的计算模型能够用于安全关键的临床决策，需要对预测的准确性进行彻底和严格的测试。“验证、确认和不确定性量化”领域已经发展起来，以评估计算预测的可信度。第一阶段是验证，即评估计算软件在多大程度上正确地解决了基本的数学方程。本文的目的是介绍用于验证多细胞电生理求解器的新方法，这是求解器在临床应用中具有信心地使用的关键的第一步。我们为心脏电生理的单域、双域和双域-灌流浴公式定义了 1D-3D 模型问题，每个问题都有精确解，这使得首次可以在所有维度上对完全耦合问题进行针对精确误差的心脏求解器测试。这些问题是精心构建的，以便可以使用通用求解器轻松运行，并且可以极大地增加对实现正确性的信心，我们通过在这些问题上测试一个主要求解器“Chaste”来说明这一点。然后，我们针对两个特定应用进行了计算验证（也称为解验证）的案例研究。最后，我们就心脏建模中的验证提出了几点建议。
