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).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Inverse Electrocardiography: A methodology that reconstructs the inner structure of the heart using multichannel ECG.
Graphics Processing Unit (GPU): A dedicated graphics rendering device for a personal computer, workstation, or game console.
Space–Time Adaptive Mesh Refinement Algorithm: An adaptive mesh refinement method, able to vary the spatial and temporal resolution.
Torso Model: A model that describes the electric connections among heart regions and surface electrodes.
Heart Model: A model that describes the electric and mechanic functioning of the whole heart.
Cell Model: A model that describes the electric and mechanic functioning of a cardiac cell.
Heart Simulation: A simulation that focuses on the functional modeling of the heart.