Related papers: Extinction Dynamics of Cardiac Fibrillation
Pair-annihilation events are ubiquitous in a variety of spatially extended systems and are often studied using computationally expensive simulations. Here we develop an approach in which we simulate the pair-annihilation of spiral wave tips…
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 arrhythmia can be categorized into tachycardia, flutter, and fibrillation. Atrial fibrillation is a prevalent heart disease that results in weak and irregular contractions of the atria. It affects millions people worldwide and…
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…
Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common abnormal heart rhythm and the single biggest cause of stroke. Ablation, destroying regions of the atria, is applied largely empirically and can be curative but with a disappointing clinical…
Atrial fibrillation is a clinical arrhythmia with multifactorial mechanisms still unresolved. Time-frequency analysis of epicardial electrograms has been investigated to study atrial fibrillation. However, deeper understanding of atrial…
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…
Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality. AF prevalence increases with age, which is attributed to pathophysiological changes that aid AF initiation and perpetuation. Current state-of-the-art models are only…
The mechanisms underlying cardiac fibrillation have been investigated for over a century, but we are still finding surprising results that change our view of this phenomenon. The present study focuses on the transition from normal rhythm to…
Surgical ablation (SA) is the most effective procedure to terminate atrial fibrillation (AF) in patients requiring concomitant open heart surgery. However, considering the great stress provoked in the patients heart, along with the benefits…
Atrial fibrillation (AF) increases the risk of stroke by a factor of four to five and is the most common abnormal heart rhythm. The progression of AF with age, from short self-terminating episodes to persistence, varies between individuals…
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…
Spiral waves are self-repeating waves that can form in excitable media, propagating outward from their center in a spiral pattern. Spiral waves have been observed in different natural phenomena and have been linked to medical conditions…
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…
The statistical properties of heart beat intervals of 130 long-term surface electrocardiogram recordings during atrial fibrillation (AF) are investigated. We find that the distribution of interbeat intervals exhibits a characteristic…
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…
Complex spatiotemporal patterns of action potential duration have been shown to occur in many mammalian hearts due to a period-doubling bifurcation that develops with increasing frequency of stimulation. Here, through high-resolution…
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…
Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common arrhythmia affecting millions of people in the Western countries and, due to the widespread impact on the population and its medical relevance, is largely investigated in both clinical and…
Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common cardiac arrhythmia in human beings, and is associated with significant morbidity and mortality. The current standard of care includes interventional catheter ablation in selected patients, but the…