Alternans and spiral breakup in a human ventricular tissue model

Alternans and spiral breakup in a human ventricular tissue model.

Ventricular fibrillation (VF) is one of the main causes of death in the Western world. According to one hypothesis, the chaotic excitation dynamics during VF are the result of dynamical instabilities in action potential duration (APD) the occurrence of which requires that the slope of the APD restitution curve exceeds 1. Other factors such as electrotonic coupling and cardiac memory also determ...

Alternans and spiral breakup in a human ventricular

Preventing alternans-induced spiral wave breakup in cardiac tissue: an ion-channel-based approach.

The detailed processes involved in spiral wave breakup, believed to be one major mechanism by which tachycardia evolves into fibrillation, are still poorly understood. This has rendered difficult the proper design of an efficient and practical control stimulus protocol to eliminate such events. In order to gain new insights into the underlying electrophysiological and dynamical mechanisms of br...

Alternans and Spiral Breakup in an Excitable Reaction-Diffusion System: A Simulation Study

The determination of the mechanisms of spiral breakup in excitable media is still an open problem for researchers. In the context of cardiac electrophysiological activities, spiral breakup exhibits complex spatiotemporal pattern known as ventricular fibrillation. The latter is the major cause of sudden cardiac deaths all over the world. In this paper, we numerically study the instability of per...

Spiral-Wave Dynamics in a Mathematical Model of Human Ventricular Tissue with Myocytes and Fibroblasts

Cardiac fibroblasts, when coupled functionally with myocytes, can modulate the electrophysiological properties of cardiac tissue. We present systematic numerical studies of such modulation of electrophysiological properties in mathematical models for (a) single myocyte-fibroblast (MF) units and (b) two-dimensional (2D) arrays of such units; our models build on earlier ones and allow for zero-, ...