Section: New Results

Electrocardiographic lead fields

Currently a monodomain reaction-diffusion model is a well-established method to simulate the electrical activity of the heart [58], [59], even more so because it can be adapted to approximate a bidomain model very closely [46], [49]. Computing the electrocardiogram (ECG) from the results of such models is harder because it requires large linear systems to be solved, and does not scale well to large numbers of processors. A possible solution is to use so-called lead fields, the electrocardiographic term for a linear combination of Green's functions that express the ECG potential as an integral over a field of electric current dipoles. M. Potse has implemented and tested methods to compute and use lead fields for ECG simulation with the Propag code. It turned out that this classical method is practical and sufficiently accurate, and gives a huge scaling advantage on modern highly parallel computers. This result is of practical importance for our applied work, and a journal manuscript on this topic will be submitted in January 2018.