Shock-induced arrhythmogenesis in the human heart: A computational modelling study

Electrical defibrillation by application of a strong shock to the heart is the only effective treatment against lethal cardiac arrhythmias such as ventricular fibrillation. A large body of experimental and computational research has been devoted to understanding shock-induced effects on the heart in an attempt to improve defibrillation efficacy. However, most of the research has been performed in small animal hearts, and in particular rabbits. The difference in size between rabbits and humans might limit the extrapolation of the results to the clinical setting. In this paper, we present, for the first time, computer simulations of shock-induced effects on a human ventricular model with realistic ion channel dynamics and fibre architecture. Bidomain simulations using the human ventricular model were performed using the Chaste open source simulation package. The parallel performance of the software package was highly improved in order to meet the computational requirements of these kind of studies.

[1]  David Gavaghan,et al.  The role of transmural ventricular heterogeneities in cardiac vulnerability to electric shocks. , 2008, Progress in biophysics and molecular biology.

[2]  Jonathan P. Whiteley,et al.  Physiology Driven Adaptivity for the Numerical Solution of the Bidomain Equations , 2007, Annals of Biomedical Engineering.

[3]  J. Ross,et al.  Fiber Orientation in the Canine Left Ventricle during Diastole and Systole , 1969, Circulation research.

[4]  M.O. Bernabeu,et al.  High performance computer simulations for the study of biological function in 3D heart models incorporating fibre orientation and realistic geometry at para-cellular resolution , 2008, 2008 Computers in Cardiology.

[5]  Steve McKeever,et al.  On the application of partial evaluation to the optimisation of cardiac electrophysiological simulations , 2006, PEPM '06.

[6]  N. Trayanova,et al.  Upper limit of vulnerability in a defibrillation model of the rabbit ventricles. , 2003, Journal of electrocardiology.

[7]  Natalia A Trayanova,et al.  Differences Between Left and Right Ventricular Chamber Geometry Affect Cardiac Vulnerability to Electric Shocks , 2005, Circulation research.

[8]  Felipe Aguel,et al.  Computer simulations of cardiac defibrillation: a look inside the heart , 2002 .

[9]  K. T. ten Tusscher,et al.  Alternans and spiral breakup in a human ventricular tissue model. , 2006, American journal of physiology. Heart and circulatory physiology.

[10]  Alexander G. Fletcher,et al.  Chaste: A test-driven approach to software development for biological modelling , 2009, Comput. Phys. Commun..

[11]  Jonathan P. Whiteley,et al.  An Efficient Numerical Technique for the Solution of the Monodomain and Bidomain Equations , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

[12]  Natalia Trayanova,et al.  Cardiac vulnerability to electric shocks during phase 1A of acute global ischemia. , 2004, Heart rhythm.