Workshop on Biomechanics and Chemotaxis, Fri, 14 Dec, 2007
Speaker: Gernot Plank
Abstract
Electrical disturbances (arrhythmias) in the heart impair its capability to maintain blood flow in the cardiovascular system at a suffient level. Highly disorganized arrhythmias such as ventricular fibrillation lead to death within a few minutes. The exact mechanisms
underlying the initiation, maintenance and the break-up into such highly disorganized electric activation patterns (arrhythmogenesis) remain poorly understood. The only effective therapy in the case of such otherwise lethal arrhythmias is the application of a strong electrical shock (electrical defibrillation) to restore the natural activation sequence.
Mathematical modelling of arrhythmogenesis and defibrillation has proved to be a very powerful tool for mechanistic inquiries into the nature of these phenomena. Over the last few years, computer models of the electric activity heart have become increasingly realistic accounting for both dynamic membrane behavior and macro- and microanatomy in great detail. Most frequently the cardiac bidomain equations are used to model cardiac bioelectric phenomena at the tissue and organ level. However, even when the most powerful HPC resources are employed, electrophysiological studies employing “Virtual Heart” simulators based on these equations remain to be a large computational challenge.
This talk will present the details of the numerical concepts underlying such simulators based on the numerical framework incorporated in the Cardiac Arrhythmia Research
Package (CARP) one of the most powerful simulators available today. The numerical scheme is broken up into 3 steps, the solution of a parabolic PDE, an elliptic PDE and a set of ODEs where the main computational burden is imposed by the elliptic portion
and the system of extremely stiff ODEs. Multilevel preconditioning techniques have been shown to substantially improve the efficiency of the elliptic solves and temporal multiscale decoupling approaches bear significant promise to allow an efficient integrations of
the system of ODEs.
URL: www.ricam.oeaw.ac.at/specsem/ssqbm/participants/abstracts/index.php
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