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A Comparison of the Bidomain and EMI Models in Refractory Cardiac Tissue

Date

2023-01-19

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

ORCID

0000-0002-7648-465X

Type

Thesis

Degree Level

Masters

Abstract

Computational cardiac modelling has made incredible strides over the past 40 years toward becoming an integral component of healthcare. The majority of cardiac modelling is accomplished using the bidomain or monodomain models, equations describing electrical conduction in cardiac tissue. These models use a volume averaging approach in which the structure of individual cells is disregarded; instead, cells are treated homogeneously as a continuum. Although this approach often provides an adequate view of cardiac activity at the macro level, there are situations where this approximation is insufficient, such as when discontinuities at the cellular level are implicated in a given disease or phenomenon. To address this, a more detailed tissue model has recently been developed: the extracellular-membrane-intracellular (EMI) model. The EMI model explicitly defines the extracellular, membrane, and intracellular compartments to form a highly detailed model of cardiac tissue. However, this additional level of detail also poses a high computational cost. This thesis investigates the trade-off that exists between the conventional bidomain model and the EMI model. To do this, we carry out a comparison study. This constitutes the first EMI comparison study that has been conducted outside of the research group that developed the model. Using both models, we find the currents required to trigger consecutive action potentials at varying time intervals. We then use these data points to construct refractory profiles for each model and compare these profiles against available experimental data. Our findings demonstrate that within the framework of this study, the behaviour of the EMI model is noticeably closer to experimental data than the behaviour of the bidomain model. These results have implications on the way we approach tissue model selection in the future, as well as for our general understanding of the refractory properties of cardiac tissue.

Description

Keywords

cardiac modeling, electrophysiology, bidomain model, EMI model, relative refractory period

Citation

Degree

Master of Science (M.Sc.)

Department

Biomedical Engineering

Program

Biomedical Engineering

Part Of

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DOI

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