Section: New Results

Highly scalable ECG simulation with electrocardiographic lead fields

Currently a monodomain reaction-diffusion model is a well-established method to simulate the electrical activity of the heart [62], [63], even more so because it can be adapted to approximate a bidomain model very closely [48], [54]. 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 fundamental solutions that express the ECG potential as an integral over a field of electric current dipoles. A paper published in 2018 has shown that this method gives a huge scaling advantage on highly parallel computers [27]. This result is also of practical importance for our applied work.