An adaptive mesh refinement method, able to vary the spatial and temporal resolution.
Published in Chapter:
Spatial Heart Simulation and Adaptive Wave Propagation
Sándor Miklós Szilágyi (Hungarian Science University of Transylvania, Romania), László Szilágyi (Hungarian Science University of Transylvania, Romania), Attila Frigy (County Medical Clinic, Romania), Levente Gorog (Hungarian Science University of Transylvania, Romania), and Zoltán Benyó (Dept. of Control Engineering and Information Technology, Hungary)
Copyright: © 2008
|Pages: 8
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-889-5.ch157
Abstract
Sudden cardiac death, caused mostly by ventricular fibrillation, is responsible for at least five million deaths in the world each year. Despite decades of research, the mechanisms responsible for ventricular fibrillation are not well understood. As most computational studies are limited primarily to planar simulations, experiments so far have not elucidated the mechanisms responsible for spatial phenomenon (Janse, Wilms-Schopman, & Coronel, 1995) of ventricular fibrillation. It would be important to understand how the onset of arrhythmias that cause fibrillation depends on details such as heart size (Winfree, 1994), geometry (Vetter & McCulloch, 1998; Panfilov, 1999), mechanical and electrical state, anisotropic fiber structure (Fenton & Karma, 1998), and inhomogeneities (Antzelevitch et al., 1999; Wolk, Cobbe, Hicks, & Kane, 1999). The main difficulty in development of a quantitatively accurate simulation of an entire three-dimensional human heart is that human heart muscle is a strongly excitable medium whose electrical dynamics involve rapidly varying, highly localized fronts (Cherry, Greenside, & Henriquez, 2000).