Modeling Excitable Systems: Reentrant Tachycardia
Abstract
Excitable membranes are an important type of nonlinear dynamical system and their study can be used to provide a connection between physical and biological circuits. We discuss two models of excitable membranes important in cardiac and neural tissues. One model is based on the Fitzhugh-Nagumo equations and the other is based on a three-transistor excitable circuit. We construct a circuit that simulates reentrant tachycardia and its treatment by surgical ablation. This project is appropriate for advanced undergraduates as a laboratory capstone project, or as a senior thesis or honors project, and can also be a collaborative project, with one student responsible for the computational predictions and another for the circuit construction and measurements.
Cite
@article{arxiv.0807.0451,
title = {Modeling Excitable Systems: Reentrant Tachycardia},
author = {Jarrett L. Lancaster and Esther M. Leise and Edward H. Hellen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0807.0451},
year = {2012}
}
Comments
9 pages, twocolumn, revised and published in American Journal of Physics