Related papers: Ionic-heterogeneity-induced spiral- and scroll-wav…
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…
The heartbeat is mediated between cardiac cells by waves of electrical depolarisation. During cardiac arrhythmias, electrical activity was found to be organised in scroll waves which rotate around a dynamical filament curve. In this thesis,…
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…
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…
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…
Cardiac arrhythmias such as ventricular tachycardia (VT) or ventricular fibrillation (VF) are the leading cause of death in the industrialised world. There is a growing consensus that these arrhythmias arise because of the formation of…
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…
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,…
Spiral waves of excitation in cardiac tissue are associated with life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias. It is, therefore, important to study the electrophysiological factors that affect the dynamics of these spiral waves. By using an…
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…
It has become widely accepted that the most dangerous cardiac arrhythmias are due to re- entrant waves, i.e., electrical wave(s) that re-circulate repeatedly throughout the tissue at a higher frequency than the waves produced by the heart's…
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…
This paper investigates the properties of unstable single-spiral wave solutions arising in the Karma model of two-dimensional cardiac tissue. In particular, we discuss how such solutions can be computed numerically on domains of arbitrary…
A scroll wave in a very thin layer of excitable medium is similar to a spiral wave, but its behaviour is affected by the layer geometry. We identify the effect of sharp variations of the layer thickness, which is separate from filament…
Spiral wave patterns observed in models of cardiac arrhythmias and chemical oscillations develop alternans and stationary line defects, which can both be thought of as period-doubling instabilities. These instabilities are observed on…
Fibroblast-myocyte coupling can modulate electrical-wave dynamics in cardiac tissue. In diseased hearts, the distribution of fibroblasts is heterogeneous, so there can be gradients in the fibroblast density (henceforth we call this GFD)…
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…
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…
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…
Spiral wave propagation in period-2 excitable media is often accompanied by line-defects, the locus of points with period-1 oscillations. Here we investigate spiral line-defects in cardiac tissue where period-2 behavior has a known…