Simulation of Reentrant Wave Dynamics in Cardiac Tissue According to the Severity of Fibrosis

초록

This study investigated the spiral wave dynamics in cardiac tissue according to the severity of fibrosis in the hypertrophic human ventricle by simulating propagation of the electric wave. We used a model of the human ventricular cell to describe the cellular electrophysiology and a two-dimensional monodomain method to compute the electric wave propagation in ventricular tissue using finite element approximation. To delineate the effect of fibrosis on the wave dynamics, a model of hypertrophic cardiac tissue with randomly distributed fibroblasts was simulated. The electrical conductivity of the fibroblasts was estimated from the experimental data. In the fibrotic cardiac tissue, we generated a reentrant wave and predicted its dynamic variation according to the severity of fibrosis. Compared to the reentrant wave in normal tissue, a conduction delay was observed in the fibrotic tissue. Furthermore, one spiral wave broke into several waves when fibroblasts constituted 40 % of the tissue, causing cardiac fibrillation.

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