The ability to perform precise, spatially localized actuation and measurements of electrical activity in the heart is crucial in understanding cardiac electrophysiology and devising new therapeutic solutions for control of cardiac arrhythmias. Current cardiac imaging techniques (i.e. optical mapping) employ voltage- or calcium-sensitive fluorescent dyes to visualize the electrical signal propag...

This work introduces a novel, unconditionally stable and fully coupled finite element method for the bidomain system of equations of cardiac electrophysiology. The transmembrane potential Φ(i)-Φ(e) and the extracellular potential Φ(e) are treated as independent variables. To this end, the respective reaction-diffusion equations are recast into weak forms via a conventional isoparametric Galerki...

Intracardiac pacemaker and defibrillator implantations were initially described a half century and a quarter century ago, respectively.1,2 Originally conceived as devices for the treatment of symptomatic bradycardia and sustained ventricular tachyarrhythmias, these therapies have subsequently been applied to the management of an increasing host of arrhythmia and other indications, including the...

INTRODUCTION The "Experimental Data and Geometric Analysis Repository", or EDGAR is an Internet-based archive of curated data that are freely distributed to the international research community for the application and validation of electrocardiographic imaging (ECGI) techniques. The EDGAR project is a collaborative effort by the Consortium for ECG Imaging (CEI, ecg-imaging.org), and focused on ...

In this work, we develop an interactive framework for rehearsal of and training in cardiac catheter ablation, and for planning cardiac resynchronization therapy. To this end, an interactive and real-time electrophysiology model of the heart is developed to fit patient-specific data. The proposed interactive framework relies on two main contributions. First, an efficient implementation of cardia...

Overall cardiac output (the amount of blood the heart pumps around the body every minute) is a function of how much blood the heart ejects with every beat, and the heart rate. Many factors work in concert to regulate heart rate. A thorough understanding of normal mechanisms of cardiac electrical activation and modifying factors is a necessary precursor to understanding disease states, and their...

T ( H r l i p p p r a linical cardiac electrophysiology and cardiac pacing have erged into a common cardiac subspecialty discipline. Comlex cardiac arrhythmias are managed by physicians with pecial expertise in cardiac electrophysiology, the use of cardiac mplantable electrical devices (CIEDs), and the application of ther interventional ablative techniques and pharmacologic reatments. Cardiac i...

D.C. Sigg et al. (eds.), Cardiac Electrophysiology Methods and Models, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-6658-2_2, © Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2010 Abstract Cardiomyocytes are excitable cells that have the ability to contract after excitation; therefore, each heartbeat is an event of electrical–mechanical coupling. Cardiac electrical activity at different levels can be measured through variab...

The traditional cardiac model-building paradigm involves constructing a composite model using data collected from many cells. Equations are derived for each relevant cellular component (e.g., ion channel, exchanger) independently. After the equations for all components are combined to form the composite model, a subset of parameters is tuned, often arbitrarily and by hand, until the model outpu...

This work aims at developing a training simulator for interventional radiology and thermo-ablation of cardiac arrhythmias. To achieve this, a real-time model of the cardiac electrophysiology is needed, which is very challenging due to the stiff equations involved. In this paper, we detail our contributions in order to obtain efficient cardiac electrophysiology simulations. First, an adaptive pa...