A conduction velocity adapted eikonal model for electrophysiology problems with re-excitability evaluation

Abstract

Computational models of heart electrophysiology achieved a considerable interest in the medical community as they represent a novel framework for the study of the mechanisms underpinning heart pathologies. The high demand of computational resources and the long computational time required to evaluate the model solution hamper the use of detailed computational models in clinical applications. In this paper, we present a multi-front eikonal algorithm that adapts the conduction velocity (CV) to the activation frequency of the tissue substrate. We then couple the eikonal new algorithm with the Mitchell-Schaeffer (MS) ionic model to determine the tissue electrical state. Compared to the standard eikonal model, this model introduces three novelties: first, it evaluates the local value of the transmembrane potential and of the ionic variable solving an ionic model; second, it computes the action potential duration (APD) and the diastolic interval (DI) from the solution of the MS model and uses them to determine if the tissue is locally re-excitable; third, it adapts the CV to the underpinning electrophysiological state through an analytical expression of the CV restitution and the computed local DI. We conduct series of simulations on a 3D tissue slab and on a realistic heart geometry and compare the solutions with those obtained solving the monodomain equation. Our results show that the new model is significantly more accurate than the standard eikonal model. The proposed model enables the numerical simulation of the heart electrophysiology on a clinical time scale and thus constitutes a viable model candidate for computer-guided radio-frequency ablation.

Keywords: Cardiac electrophysiology; Clinical time scale; Conduction velocity; Dijkstra algorithm; Mitchell And Schaeffer model; Multi-front eikonal model.