The heart is a muscular pump that moves approximatly 8,000 litres per day through the human body. It manages to this by a combination of contraction/relaxation along muscle fibers and elastic recoil. These two effects are indistinguishable in a medical image, but can be estimated using a computational model.

In our work we use adjoint based optimization techniques in order to determine muscle contraction and elastic recoil in a patient specific left ventricular geometry based on echocardiography and pressure catheter data. Possible applications of the technique include mechanical stress estimation and hypothesis testing in cardiac resynchronization therapy research.