A Comparison of Monodomain and Bidomain Reaction-Diffusion Models for Action Potential Propagation in the Human Heart

Abstract

A bidomain reaction-diffusion model of the human heart was developed, and potentials resulting from normal depolarization and repolarization were compared with results from a compatible monodomain model. Comparisons were made for an empty isolated heart and for a heart with fluid-filled ventricles. Both sinus rhythm and ectopic activation were simulated. The bidomain model took 2 days on 32 processors to simulate a complete cardiac cycle. Differences between monodomain and bidomain results were extremely small, even for the extracellular potentials, which in case of the monodomain model were computed with a high-resolution forward model. Propagation of activation was 2% faster in the bidomain model than in the monodomain model. Electrograms computed with monodomain and bidomain models were visually indistinguishable. We conclude that, in the absence of applied currents, propagating action potentials on the scale of a human heart can be studied with a monodomain model.

An in-silico analysis of the effect of heart position and orientation on the ECG morphology and vectorcardiogram parameters in patients with heart failure and intraventricular conduction defects

“…From this model a computational mesh was formed. Mesh nodes were labeled tissue-specifically and fiber orientations were assigned to the ventricular nodes using a rule-based method [10]. To compare simulated and measured activation times, a set of catheter locations from the electroanatomical mapping system was aligned with the LV endocardium [9].…”

“…Electrophysiological simulations were performed using propag-5 [10]. Computations were performed on a Cray XE6 supercomputer operated by the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre CSCS.…”

A comparison of coupled and uncoupled solvers for the cardiac Bidomain model

“…Previous works have considered several variants of these splitting and/or uncoupling techniques. In particular, the uncoupled approach has been considered in [1,22,35,36,45,47,[51][52][53][54]. The splitting of reaction and diffusion terms has been considered in [35,53,54], while a three steps Strang splitting, with reaction -diffusion -reaction steps, has been considered in [22,47,51].…”

“…In the standard uncoupled method, the first parabolic correction can be solved explicitly as e.g. in [36,45] or by a semi-implicit method as e.g. in [1,45].…”

Approche multi-échelle appliqué à la modélisation de l’activité électrique du coeur

“…On définit ensuite un maillage où les tenseurs de résistivité et les propriétés membranaires sont définis à chaque noeud. Quelque vingt-six millions de noeuds sont nécessaires pour construire un modèle de coeur humain avec une résolution de 0,2 mm ( Figure 4B) [25]. Le tenseur de résistivité tient compte du fait que les conductivités intra et extracellulaires sont plus grandes dans la direction des fibres, et que cette direction change entre l'endocarde et l'épicarde.…”