J. P. Keener and A. V. Panfilov, The effects of geometry and fiber orientation on propagation and extracellular potentials in myocardium, in Computational Biology of the Heart, ed. A. V. Panfilov and A. V. Holden, Wiley,1996.

Abstract:

The numerical simulation of the activation sequence and the corresponding extracellular potential distribution in three- dimensional ventricular tissue is made difficult by the fact that the action potential is sharp, requiring a fine spatial and temporal resolution. To overcome this restriction, we present a computational model of propagation that tracks the location of the action potential upstroke without tracking the fine details of the upstroke dynamics, thereby permitting simulation of the activation sequence and the extracellular potential distribution on much larger spatial domains. This model is fully physiological, as all parameters of the model are directly determined from experiments.

To demonstrate the utility of this approach, the results of two model studies are presented. In the first, we study the effects of anisotropy and fiber rotation on the activation sequence and extracellular potentials in a large three-dimensional slab of tissue. In the second, we examine the effects of geometry, fiber orientation and anisotropy on the activation sequence in intact ventricles. For this intact heart simulation we use recent geometry and fiber orientation data from the laboratory of P. Hunter.

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