Evolution of Spiral and Scroll Waves of Excitation in a Mathematical Model of Ischaemic Border Zone
Year: 2011
Type: article
Abstract: Abnormal electrical activity from the boundaries of ischemic cardiac tissue is recognized as one of the major causes in generation of ischemia-reperfusion arrhythmias. Here we present theoretical analysis of the waves of electrical activity that can rise on the boundary of cardiac cell network upon its recovery from ischaemia-like conditions. The main factors included in our analysis are macroscopic gradients of the cell-to-cell coupling and cell excitability and microscopic heterogeneity of individual cells. The interplay between these factors allows one to explain how spirals form, drift together with the moving boundary, get transiently pinned to local inhomogeneities, and finally penetrate into the bulk of the well-coupled tissue where they reach macroscopic scale. The asymptotic theory of the drift of spiral and scroll waves based on response functions provides explanation of the drifts involved in this mechanism, with the exception of effects due to the discreteness of cardiac tissue. In particular, this asymptotic theory allows an extrapolation of 2D events into 3D, which has shown that cells within the border zone can give rise to 3D analogues of spirals, the scroll waves. When and if such scroll waves escape into a better coupled tissue, they are likely to collapse due to the positive filament tension. However, our simulations have shown that such collapse of newly generated scrolls is not inevitable and that under certain conditions filament tension becomes negative, leading to scroll filaments to expand and multiply leading to a fibrillation-like state within small areas of cardiac tissue.
Source: PLoS ONE
Institutions: University of Liverpool, George Washington University
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,382
Awards: G106199491, Low flow reperfusion after acute myocardial ischemia: when too little is too much, BeatBox - HPC Environment for Biophysically and Anatomically Realistic Cardiac Simulations, Response functions for drift of spiral and scroll waves, Participation in the Cardiac Dynamics research program organised by Kavli Iinstitute for Theoretical Physics, summer 2006., G458673570, G4906240913, G542089590, Non-reentrant arrhythmias: ectopic nexus hypothesis, G6171266463, G6573131785, G7269550440, BeatBox - HPC Environment for Biophysically and Anatomically Realistic Cardiac Simulations, G834161072, Response functions for drift of spiral and scroll waves
OpenAlex ID: W2101508576