Simulation of left ventricular ischemia based on anatomically detailed geometry

Based on the anatomically detailed geometry of human heart, an integrated human ventricle model is proposed to simulate the reentrant wave propagation for studying the generation mechanism of arrhythmia caused by myocardial ischemia. To deal with the no-flux boundary conditions, the phase-field method is adopted to automatically handle the complicated boundary conditions. Through increasing the concentration of extracellular K⁺ in the ischemic region, reentrant spiral wave dynamics under different ischemic conditions is simulated. Experimental results show that the degree of myocardial ischemia would have an important influence on the behavior of wave propagation. With the increasing of myocardial ischemia, the reentrant wave would become more and more instable, which eventually leads to breakup. Although the reentrant wave can pass through the ischemic region, the behavior of action potentials of myocardial cells in the ischemic region would be different from the normal behavior, and the inconsistency of action potentials in space is the intrinsic reason for the emergence of arrhythmia.