Berlin 2012 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 19: Nonlinear Dynamics of the Heart: Contributed talks to focus session

DY 19.5: Talk

Wednesday, March 28, 2012, 16:00–16:15, MA 001

Negative tension of scroll wave filaments in cardiac tissue — •Sergio Alonso¹, Markus Bär¹, and Alexander V. Panfilov² — ¹Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, Abbestrasse 2-12, 10587 Berlin, Germany — ²Department of Physics and Astronomy, Gent University, Krijgslaan 281, S9 9000 Gent, Belgium

Scroll waves are vortices that occur in three-dimensional excitable media. Scroll waves have been observed in a variety of systems including cardiac tissue, where they are associated with cardiac arrhythmias. The disorganization of scroll waves into chaotic behavior is thought to be the mechanism of ventricular fibrillation, whose lethality is widely known. One possible mechanism of scroll wave instability is negative filament tension. It was discovered in 1987 in a simple two variables model of an excitable medium. Since that time negative filament tension of scroll waves and the resulting complex, often turbulent dynamics was studied in many generic models of excitable media and physiologically realistic models of cardiac tissue. Here we discuss the relation of negative filament tension and tissue excitability and the effects of discreteness in the tissue on the generation of the negative filament tension. We discuss the application of the negative tension mechanism to computational cardiology, where it is regarded as a fundamental mechanism that explains differences in the onset of arrhythmias in thin two-dimensional and thick three-dimensional tissue.