Computational Simulation of Traveling Arrhythmic Waves in Myocardial Tissue

Cardiac arrhythmias are common cardiac disorders characterized by irregular electrical activity of the heart. Each year in the United States alone, about half a million deaths and 835,000 hospital discharges result from arrhythmias. In fact, atrial fibrillation is responsible for 15–20% of all ischemic strokes [1]. Due to the complexity of the electrical conduction pathways in myocardium, computational models are useful platforms for gaining insight into the origin of arrhythmias, as well as the development of corrective options. For these purposes, a quantitative finite element model based on the phenomenological Aliev and Panfilov model [2] was implemented to characterize the electrical behavior of cardiac tissue. Several examples of simulated re-entrant spiral waves demonstrate that our implementation can indeed capture the electrical aspects of cardiac tissue.