Section: Scientific Foundations

Complex models for the propagation of cardiac action potentials

Cardiac arrythmias originates from the multiscale organisation of the cardiac action potential from the cellular scale up to the scale of the body. It relates the molecular processes from the cell membranes to the electrocardiogram, an electrical signal on the torso. The spatio-temporal patterns of this propagation is related both to the function of the cellular membrane and of the structural organisation of the cells into tissues, into the organ and final within the body.

Several improvements of current models of the propagation of the action potential will be developped, based on previous work [11] , [3] , [12] and on the data available at the Liryc:

• Enrichment of the current monodomain and bidomain models by accounting for structural heterogeneities of the tissue at an intermediate scale. Here we focus on multiscale analysis techniques applied to the various high-resolution structural data available at the Liryc.

• Coupling of the tissues from the different cardiac compartments and conduction systems. Here, we want to develop model that couples 1D, 2D and 3D phenomena described by reaction-diffusion PDEs.

These models are essential to improve our in-depth understanding of cardiac electrical dysfunction. To this aim, we will use high-performance computing techniques in order to explore numerically the complexity of these models and check that they are reliable experimental tools.