Elsevier

Journal of Computational Physics

Volume 346, 1 October 2017, Pages 191-211
Journal of Computational Physics

Efficient computation of electrograms and ECGs in human whole heart simulations using a reaction-eikonal model

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcp.2017.06.020Get rights and content
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Abstract

Anatomically accurate and biophysically detailed bidomain models of the human heart have proven a powerful tool for gaining quantitative insight into the links between electrical sources in the myocardium and the concomitant current flow in the surrounding medium as they represent their relationship mechanistically based on first principles. Such models are increasingly considered as a clinical research tool with the perspective of being used, ultimately, as a complementary diagnostic modality. An important prerequisite in many clinical modeling applications is the ability of models to faithfully replicate potential maps and electrograms recorded from a given patient. However, while the personalization of electrophysiology models based on the gold standard bidomain formulation is in principle feasible, the associated computational expenses are significant, rendering their use incompatible with clinical time frames.

In this study we report on the development of a novel computationally efficient reaction-eikonal (R-E) model for modeling extracellular potential maps and electrograms. Using a biventricular human electrophysiology model, which incorporates a topologically realistic His–Purkinje system (HPS), we demonstrate by comparing against a high-resolution reaction–diffusion (R–D) bidomain model that the R-E model predicts extracellular potential fields, electrograms as well as ECGs at the body surface with high fidelity and offers vast computational savings greater than three orders of magnitude. Due to their efficiency R-E models are ideally suitable for forward simulations in clinical modeling studies which attempt to personalize electrophysiological model features.

Keywords

Cardiac electrophysiology
Bidomain model
Eikonal model
Electrical activation and repolarization

Cited by (0)

This research was supported by the grants F3210-N18 and I2760-B30 from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and the EU grant CardioProof 611232. Fernando O. Campos acknowledges financial support from CNPq - Brazil. We acknowledge PRACE for awarding us access to resource SuperMUC based in Germany at LRZ (grant CAMEL), and the Vienna Scientific Cluster VSC3. Further support was received from ERACoSysMed administered through ANR-15-CMED-0003-01 and Agence National de Recherche grants ANR-13-MONU-0004-02 and ANR-10-IAHU-04.