This computational study demonstrates how increasing coupling strength in cardiac cell networks drives the transition to global synchronization and generates complex spatio-temporal patterns like spiral waves.
Hypothesis-generating for cardiac arrhythmia mechanisms; leaves open translation to human tissue or practice.
We study collective phenomena in nonhomogeneous cardiac cell culture models, including one- and two-dimensional lattices of oscillatory cells and mixtures of oscillatory and excitable cells. Individual cell dynamics is described by a modified Luo-Rudy model with depolarizing current. We focus on the transition from incoherent behavior to global synchronization via cluster synchronization regimes as coupling strength is increased. These regimes are characterized qualitatively by space-time plots and quantitatively by profiles of local frequencies and distributions of cluster sizes in dependence upon coupling strength. We describe spatio-temporal patterns arising during this transition, including pacemakers, spiral waves, and complicated irregular activity.
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Kanakov et al. (2007) studied this question.
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