Theoretical modeling of excitable media demonstrates complex spiral pair dynamics that may inform the understanding and diagnosis of cardiac arrhythmias.
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No clinical implications yet; hypothesis-generating for spiral wave mechanisms in cardiac arrhythmias.
The dynamics of unidirectionally propagating pulses in a two-dimensional uniform excitable reaction-diffusion medium is investigated. It is shown that under weak diffusion coupling between medium points such a pulse can evolve into a pair of counter-rotating spirals (spiral pair). We analyze the drift of such a pair and examine the collisions between several drifting pairs. It is demonstrated that collisions can result in a special type of reflection or, alternatively, in new types of complex stationary spiral structures. A possible application of these findings for the diagnosis of cardiac arrhythmias is suggested.
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Rabinovitch et al. (2006) studied this question.
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