Cardiac Arrhythmias: What can we learn from Mathematical Models for Cardiac Tissue?

Mammalian hearts are among the most efficient electro-mechanical pumps in the biological world. They sustain pulmonary and systemic circulation by pumping, rhythmically, roughly 4.5-5 L/min of blood in normal human adults. Aberrations in the normal cardiac rhythm are called cardiac arrhythmias; the most serious ones, ventricular tachycardia and ventricular fibrillation, are a leading cause of death in the industrialised world (approximately 1 out of every 6 deaths). These arrhythmias arise primarily because of the formation, and breaking, of spiral or scroll waves of electrical activation in cardiac tissue. Thus, the development of a detailed understanding of the propagation of such waves of electrical activation through cardiac tissue is an interdisciplinary problem of central importance in the biological, physical, mathematical, and computational sciences, in which in vivo, in vitro, and in silico studies play equally important and complementary roles. This lecture provides a concise overview of the initiation, propagation, break-up, and control (the mathematical analogue of defibrillation) of spiral and scroll waves in mathematical models for cardiac tissue.



My work in this area has been carried out with several students and postdoctoral fellows (A. Pande, S. Sinha, A. Sen, T.K. Shajahan, A.R. Nayak, R. Majumder, K.V. Rajany, S. Zimik, and M.K. Mulimani)