On cardiac arrythmias: AV conduction block

A cardiac arrythmia is a disturbance of the heart rate or the sequence in which the heart chambers are excited. In this paper a mathematical description and analysis of one particular type of cardiac arrythmia, AV conduction block, is given. Using properties of circle maps, we show that large period and aperiodic heartbeat patterns occur only on small parameter regions of a Cantor set construction, and therefore are rarely observed in a clinical situation.