Cookies on this website

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you click 'Accept all cookies' we'll assume that you are happy to receive all cookies and you won't see this message again. If you click 'Reject all non-essential cookies' only necessary cookies providing core functionality such as security, network management, and accessibility will be enabled. Click 'Find out more' for information on how to change your cookie settings.

Impulse propagation in biological tissues is known to be modulated by structural heterogeneity. In cardiac muscle, improved understanding on how this heterogeneity influences electrical spread is key to advancing our interpretation of dispersion of repolarization. We propose fractional diffusion models as a novel mathematical description of structurally heterogeneous excitable media, as a means of representing the modulation of the total electric field by the secondary electrical sources associated with tissue inhomogeneities. Our results, analysed against in vivo human recordings and experimental data of different animal species, indicate that structural heterogeneity underlies relevant characteristics of cardiac electrical propagation at tissue level. These include conduction effects on action potential (AP) morphology, the shortening of AP duration along the activation pathway and the progressive modulation by premature beats of spatial patterns of dispersion of repolarization. The proposed approach may also have important implications in other research fields involving excitable complex media.

Original publication

DOI

10.1098/rsif.2014.0352

Type

Journal article

Journal

J R Soc Interface

Publication Date

06/08/2014

Volume

11

Keywords

Riesz potential, cardiac tissue, dispersion of repolarization, electrotonic effects, fractional diffusion, structural heterogeneity, Action Potentials, Animals, Biological Clocks, Computer Simulation, Diffusion, Heart Conduction System, Humans, Membrane Potentials, Models, Cardiovascular, Myocytes, Cardiac, Neural Conduction