prof. dr hab. Danuta Makowiec, IFTiA UG

Cellular automata approach to cardiac electrophysiology: a toy model or a generative proposition.

Structural modifications of cardiac tissue, caused by disease or/and aging, influence the performance of the heart contraction. Clinicians would like to discern early stages of the tissue impairment based on changes in heart rate. A heart rhythm of a person after heart transplantation is special because is significantly less influenced by autonomic nervous system - the main source of heart rhythm variability in healthy people. Therefore such a rhythm could provide evidences for arrhythmogenic processes developing in the cardiac tissue. The cellular automata model will be discussed, which simulates changes in the atrial tissue and observes effects of these changes on the heart rhythm. We will show that in such approach, we are able to represent reliable and simulation efficiently both electrophysiology of a cardiac cell and tissue organization.