Spiral waves on a contractile tissue

Abstract.In a healthy cardiac tissue, electric waves propagate in the form of a travelling pulse, from the apex to the base, and activate the contraction of the heart. Defects in the propagation can destabilize travelling fronts and originate possible new periodic solutions, as spiral waves. Spiral waves are quite stable, but the interplay between currents and strain can distort the periodic pattern, provided the coupling is strong enough. In this paper we investigate the stability of spiral waves on a contractile medium in a non-standard framework, in which the electrical potential dictates the active strain (not stress) of the muscle. The role of conducting and contracting fibers is included in the model and periodic boundary conditions are adopted. A correlation analysis allows to evaluate numerically the range of stability of the parameters for the spiral waves, depending on the strain of the contracted fibers and on the magnitude of the stretch activated current.

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