Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2011:2011:437-40.
doi: 10.1109/IEMBS.2011.6090059.

A finite element approach for modeling micro-structural discontinuities in the heart

Caroline Mendonca Costa Costa  1 , Fernando O Campos, Anton J Prassl, Rodrigo Weber dos Santos, Damián Sánchez-Quintana, Ernst Hofer, Gernot Plank
Affiliations

A finite element approach for modeling micro-structural discontinuities in the heart

Caroline Mendonca Costa Costa et al. Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2011.

Abstract

The presence of connective tissue as well as interstitial clefts forms a natural barrier to the electrical propagation in the heart. At a microscopic scale, such uncoupling structures change the pattern of the electrical conduction from uniform towards complex and may play a role in the genesis of cardiac arrhythmias. The anatomical diversity of conduction structures and their topology at a microscopic size scale is overwhelming for experimental techniques. Mathematical models have been often employed to study the behavior of the electrical propagation at a sub-cellular level. However, very fine and computationally expensive meshes are required to capture all microscopic details found in the cardiac tissue. In this work, we present a numerical technique based on the finite element method which allows to reproduce the effects of microscopic conduction barriers caused by the presence of uncoupling structures without actually resolving these structures in a high resolution mesh, thereby reducing the computational costs significantly.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
High resolution histological image of a tissue slice from the rabbit ventricle. The staining (Masson’s trichrome) resulted in a coloring of cardiac cells (red), connective tissue (blue) and interstitial cleft spaces (white). The region marked by a red square was used for mesh generation.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
(A) Selected section of the high resolution histological image used to built the FE meshes. (B) Results obtained after segmentation of the high resolution image. (C) Segmented image obtained with a reduced resolution. (D) Skeleton computed according to the high resolution segmented image.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Schematic representation of the renumbering algorithm to disconnect nodes of a FE mesh.
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Spatial distribution of the transmembrane potential Vm in all three models at three different time instants (from top to bottom) after the stimulus onset. Results obtained with (A) the fine mesh, (B) the coarse mesh, and (C) applying the discontinuous FE formulation to the coarse mesh.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Kucera J, Kébler A, Rohr S. Slow conduction in cardiac tissue, ii: effects of branching tissue geometry. Circulation Research. 1998;83:795–805. - PubMed
    1. Hofer E, Sánchez-Quintana D, Plank G, Tischler M. Normal and fractionated cardiac near fields and their relation to microstructure - an experimental approach. Conf Proc IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2003;1:51–54.
    1. Spach MS. The discontinuous nature of electrical propagation in cardiac muscle. Consideration of a quantitative model incorporating the membrane ionic properties and structural complexities. The ALZA distinguished lecture. Ann Biomed Eng. 1983;11(3-4):209–61. - PubMed
    1. Hooks AD, Tomlinson AK, Marsden GS, LeGrice IJ, Smaill BH, Pullan AJ, Hunter PJ. Cardiac microstructure: implications for electrical propagation and defibrillation in the heart. Circulation Research. 2002;91:331–338. - PubMed
    1. Campos FO, Wiener T, Prassl AJ, Ahammer H, Plank G, dos Santos RW, Sánchez-Quintana D, Hofer E. A 2d-computer model of atrial tissue based on histographs describes the electro-anatomical impact of microstructure on endocardiac potentials and electric near-fields. Conf Proc IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2010;1:2541–4. - PMC - PubMed

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources

-