Spatiotemporal correlation uncovers characteristic lengths in cardiac tissue
Abstract
Complex spatiotemporal patterns of action potential duration have been shown to occur in many mammalian hearts due to period-doubling bifurcations that develop with increasing frequency of stimulation. Here, through high-resolution optical mapping experiments and mathematical modeling, we introduce a characteristic spatial length of cardiac activity in canine ventricular wedges via a spatiotemporal correlation analysis, at different stimulation frequencies and during fibrillation. We show that the characteristic length ranges from 40 to 20 cm during one-to-one responses and it decreases to a specific value of about 3 cm at the transition from period-doubling bifurcation to fibrillation. We further show that during fibrillation, the characteristic length is about 1 cm. Another significant outcome of our analysis is the finding of a constitutive phenomenological law obtained from a nonlinear fitting of experimental data which relates the conduction velocity restitution curve with the characteristic length of the system. The fractional exponent of
- Publication:
-
Physical Review E
- Pub Date:
- August 2019
- DOI:
- 10.1103/PhysRevE.100.020201
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1806.04507
- Bibcode:
- 2019PhRvE.100b0201L
- Keywords:
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- Physics - Biological Physics;
- Quantitative Biology - Tissues and Organs
- E-Print:
- 8 pages, 6 figures