In silico optical modulation of spiral wave trajectories in cardiac tissue
Abstract
Life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias such as ventricular tachycardia and fibrillation are common precursors to sudden cardiac death. They are associated with the occurrence of abnormal electrical spiral waves in the heart that rotate at a high frequency. In severe cases, arrhythmias are combated with a clinical method called defibrillation, which involves administering a single global high-voltage shock to the heart to reset all its activity and restore sinus rhythm. Despite its high efficiency in controlling arrhythmias, defibrillation is associated with several negative side effects that render the method suboptimal. The best approach to optimize this therapeutic technique is to deepen our understanding of the dynamics of spiral waves. Here, we use computational cardiac optogenetics to study and control the dynamics of a single spiral wave in a two-dimensional, electrophysiologically detailed, light-sensitive model of a mouse ventricle. First, we illuminate the domain globally by applying a sequence of periodic optical pulses with different frequencies in the sub-threshold regime where no excitation wave is induced. In doing so, we obtain epicycloidal, hypocycloidal, and resonant drift trajectories of the spiral wave core. Then, to effectively control the wave dynamics, we use a method called resonant feedback pacing. In this approach, each global optical pulse is applied when the measuring electrode positioned on the domain registers a predefined value of the membrane…
Read the paper
Related studies
- Quantum dots: synthesis, bioapplications, and toxicity
- A Guide to In Silico Drug Design
- Quantum Computing for Healthcare: A Review
- Automated in Silico Design of Homogeneous Catalysts
- Identification of Novel 3-Hydroxy-pyran-4-One Derivatives as Potent HIV-1 Integrase Inhibitors Using in silico Structure-Based Combinatorial Library Design Approach
- In silico structural elucidation of RNA-dependent RNA polymerase towards the identification of potential Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever Virus inhibitors
Go deeper in Evidence Hub
Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.