Impulse Delay in the Cardiac Conduction System

Abstract

The physiology or otherwise of blood circulation is predicated on the electrical conduction of the heart. As a rule electrical impulse suffusing the cardiac cells, just like all time-dependent phenomena, transmits with a modicum of time delay. Such delay may be physiological (benign) or pathological; the later is seen as a cardiac liability. This paper treated impulse conduction delay in the cardiac system. A set of matrices resulting from the graph theoretic description of the conduction system was generated and fitted into a continuous time invariant state-space delay equation, and a state-transition matrix solution was sought. An input control-based minimization scheme by which ensuing deleteriousness of pathological delay could be assuaged was proposed.