Related papers: Dynamics of wave fronts and filaments in anisotrop…
Rotating scroll waves are self-organising patterns which are found in many oscillating or excitable systems. Here we show that quasi-periodic (meandering) scroll waves, which include the rotors that organise cardiac arrhythmias, exhibit…
Scroll waves are three-dimensional excitation patterns that rotate around a central filament curve; they occur in many physical, biological and chemical systems. We explicitly derive the equations of motion for scroll wave filaments in…
Spatial variations in the electrical properties of cardiac tissue can occur because of cardiac diseases. We introduce such gradients into mathematical models for cardiac tissue and then study, by extensive numerical simulations, their…
Abnormal electrical activity from the boundaries of ischemic cardiac tissue is recognized as one of the major causes in generation of ischemia-reperfusion arrhythmias. Here we present theoretical analysis of the waves of electrical activity…
We derive an equation that governs the spatiotemporal dynamics of small amplitude alternans in paced cardiac tissue. We show that a pattern-forming linear instability leads to the spontaneous formation of stationary or traveling waves whose…
Asymmetries and anisotropies are widespread in biological systems, including in the structure and dynamics of cilia and eukaryotic flagella. These microscopic, hair-like appendages exhibit asymmetric beating patterns that break…
Three-dimensional excitable systems can create nonlinear scroll waves that rotate around one-dimensional phase singularities. Recent theoretical work predicts that these filaments drift along step-like height variations. Here we test this…
Capturing the emergence of deformation waves in contractile living tissues is a challenge that has recently been tackled with models of actively deformable particles. Inspired by the anisotropic deformation of cardiomyocytes in cardiac…
In a computational study we reveal a novel dynamical instability of excitation waves in the heartmuscle. The instability manifests itself as gradual local increase in the duration of the actionpotential which causes formation and…
Turbulence of scroll waves is a sort of spatio-temporal chaos that exists in three-dimensional excitable media. Cardiac tissue and the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction are examples of such media. In cardiac tissue, chaotic behaviour is…
We propose a travelling-wave perturbation method to control the spatiotemporal dynamics in a cardiac model. It is numerically demonstrated that the method can successfully suppress the wave instability (alternans in action potential…
Ventricular tachycardia (VT) and ventricular fibrillation (VF) are lethal rhythm disorders, which are associated with the occurrence of abnormal electrical scroll waves in the heart. Given the technical limitations of imaging and probing,…
While spiral wave breakup has been implicated in the emergence of atrial fibrillation, its role in maintaining this complex type of cardiac arrhythmia is less clear. We used the Karma model of cardiac excitation to investigate the dynamical…
Nonlinear waves of the reaction-diffusion (RD) type occur in many biophysical systems, including the heart, where they initiate cardiac contraction. Such waves can form vortices called scroll waves, which result in the onset of…
A scroll wave in a sufficiently thin layer of an excitable medium with negative filament tension can be stable nevertheless due to filament rigidity. Above a certain critical thickness of the medium, such scroll wave will have a tendency to…
We study the drift of spiral waves in a simple model of heterogeneous excitable medium, having gradients in local excitability or cellular coupling. For the first time, we report the anomalous drift of spiral waves towards regions having…
Every sixth death in industrialised countries occurs because of cardiac arrhythmias like ventricular tachycardia (VT) and ventricular fibrillation (VF). There is growing consensus that VT is associated with an unbroken spiral wave of…
We propose and analyse the properties of a new class of models for the electromechanics of cardiac tissue. The set of governing equations consists of nonlinear elasticity using a viscoelastic and orthotropic exponential constitutive law…
Disorganized electrical activity in the heart leads to sudden cardiac death. To what extent can this electrical turbulence be viewed as classical fluid turbulence,which is an important central problem in modern physics? We investigate,for…
We aim to understand the formation of abnormal waves of activity from myocardial regions with diminished cell-to-cell coupling. In route to this goal, we studied the behavior of a heterogeneous myocyte network in which a sharp coupling…