The Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering (CMAME) journal has awarded the inaugural Oden-Hughes Award for the Best Paper to “A comprehensive and biophysically detailed computational model of the whole human heart electromechanics.” The paper was authored by Marco Fedele, Roberto Piersanti, Francesco Regazzoni, Matteo Salvador, Pasquale Claudio Africa, Michele Bucelli, Alberto Zingaro, Luca Dede, and Alfio Quarteroni.
This prestigious award given biennially was established by CMAME in commemoration of the respective retirements from editorship of Thomas J.R. Hughes, (January 1, 2023), and the late J. Tinsley Oden (January 1, 2022).
Oden and Hughes contributed over 80 collective years as editors of CMAME. The award was established in recognition of their “outstanding contributions to Computational Science and Engineering, as well as to their dedication to CMAME,” by publishing company Elsevier.
In their paper, Fedele and colleagues introduced a complex electromechanical model that considers both the atrial and ventricular contraction, thus providing an accurate simulation of the human heart.
Alfio Quarteroni, Professor Emeritus of mathematics at the Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland), and the senior author of the paper, recently delivered a distinguished lecture at the Oden Institute focusing on a mathematical heart simulator for the comprehensive cardiac function. The lecture was part of The University of Texas’ Year of AI initiative. When asked to comment on the paper by Fedele et al., Quarteroni noted that “For the very first time, we were able to understand and mathematically describe in a biophysically detailed manner and by an accurate computational model the electromechanics of the complete human heart.”