Related papers: Memory effects, transient growth, and wave breakup…
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…
Cardiac alternans, a beat-to-beat alternation in action potential duration (at the cellular level) or in ECG morphology (at the whole heart level), is a marker of ventricular fibrillation, a fatal heart rhythm that kills hundreds of…
Interruptions in nonlinear wave propagation, commonly referred to as wave breaks, are typical of many complex excitable systems. In the heart they lead to fatal rhythm disorders, the so-called arrhythmias, which are one of the main causes…
Amplitude equations are derived that describe the spatiotemporal dynamics of cardiac alternans during periodic pacing of one- and two-dimensional homogeneous tissue and one-dimensional anatomical reentry in a ring of homogeneous tissue.…
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…
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 study the interplay between traveling action potentials and spatial inhomogeneities in the FitzHugh-Nagumo model to investigate possible mechanisms for the occurrence of fibrillatory states in the atria of the heart. Different dynamical…
An example of phase transition in natural complex systems is the qualitative and sudden change in the heart rhythm between sinus rhythm and atrial fibrillation (AF), the most common irregular heart rhythm in humans. While the system…
During episodes of atrial fibrillation, the heart's electrical activity becomes disorganized and shows fragmenting spiral waves. To systematically address how this pattern terminates using spatially extended simulations exceeds current…
Atrial fibrillation is a heart rhythm disorder that affects tens of millions people worldwide. The most effective treatment is catheter ablation. This involves irreversible heating of abnormal cardiac tissue facilitated by electroanatomical…
Atrial fibrillation (AF) is associated with cognitive impairment/dementia, independently of clinical cerebrovascular events (stroke/TIA). One of the plausible mechanisms is the occurrence of AF-induced transient critical hemodynamic events;…
We report unexpected evidence of critical fluctuations of the electric potential of the heart during atrial fibrillation in humans. Scale invariance and long range correlations are found, which we show cannot be accounted for solely with…
Atrial Fibrillation is a heart condition characterized by erratic heart rhythms caused by chaotic propagation of electrical impulses in the atria, leading to numerous health complications. State-of-the-art models employ complex algorithms…
We analyze left atrium haemodynamics, highlighting differences among healthy individuals and patients affected by atrial fibrillation. The computational study is based on patient-specific geometries of the left atria to simulate blood flow…
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…
Cardiac models are examples of excitable systems and can support stable spiral waves. For certain parameter values, however, these spiral waves can become unstable, resulting in spiral defect chaos (SDC), characterized by the continuous…
There has recently been growing evidence that atrial fibrillation (AF), the most common cardiac arrhythmia, is independently associated with the risk of dementia. This represents a very recent frontier with high social impact for the number…
Arrhythmias are potentially fatal disruptions to the normal heart rhythm, but their underlying dynamics is still poorly understood. Theoretical modeling is an important tool to fill this gap. Typical studies often employ detailed…
Patients at high risk for sudden death often exhibit complex heart rhythms in which abnormal heartbeats are interspersed with normal heartbeats. We analyze such a complex rhythm in a single patient over a 12-hour period and show that the…
Except for a few specific types, cardiac arrhythmias are not immediately life-threatening. However, if not treated appropriately, they can cause serious complications. In particular, atrial fibrillation, which is characterized by fast and…