It has become widely accepted that the most dangerous cardiac arrhythmias are due to reentrant waves, i.e., electrical wave(s) that recirculate repeatedly throughout the tissue at a higher frequency than the waves produced by the heart's natural pacemaker (sinoatrial node). However, the complicated structure of cardiac tissue, as well as the complex ionic currents in the cell, have made it extremely difficult to pinpoint the detailed dynamics of these life-threatening reentrant arrhythmias. A simplified ionic model of the cardiac action potential (AP), which can be fitted to a wide variety of experimentally and numerically obtained mesoscopic characteristics of cardiac tissue such as AP shape and restitution of AP duration and conduction velocity, is used to explain many different mechanisms of spiral wave breakup which in principle can occur in cardiac tissue. Some, but not all, of these mechanisms have been observed before using other models; therefore, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate them using just one framework model and to explain the different parameter regimes or physiological properties necessary for each mechanism (such as high or low excitability, corresponding to normal or ischemic tissue, spiral tip trajectory types, and tissue structures such as rotational anisotropy and periodic boundary conditions). Each mechanism is compared with data from other ionic models or experiments to illustrate that they are not model-specific phenomena. Movies showing all the breakup mechanisms are available at http://arrhythmia.hofstra.edu/breakup and at ftp://ftp.aip.org/epaps/chaos/E-CHAOEH-12-039203/ INDEX.html. The fact that many different breakup mechanisms exist has important implications for antiarrhythmic drug design and for comparisons of fibrillation experiments using different species, electromechanical uncoupling drugs, and initiation protocols. (c) 2002 American Institute of Physics.

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Multiple mechanisms of spiral wave breakup in a model of cardiac electrical activity

It has become widely accepted that the most dangerous cardiac arrhythmias are due to re- entrant waves, i.e., electrical wave(s) that re-circulate repeatedly throughout the tissue at a higher frequency than the waves produced by the heart's natural pacemaker (sinoatrial node). However, the complicated structure of cardiac tissue, as well as the complex ionic currents in the cell, has made it extremely difficult to pinpoint the detailed mechanisms of these life-threatening reentrant arrhythmias. A simplified ionic model of the cardiac action potential (AP), which can be fitted to a wide variety of experimentally and numerically obtained mesoscopic characteristics of cardiac tissue such as AP shape and restitution of AP duration and conduction velocity, is used to explain many different mechanisms of spiral wave breakup which in principle can occur in cardiac tissue. Some, but not all, of these mechanisms have been observed before using other models; therefore, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate them using just one framework model and to explain the different parameter regimes or physiological properties necessary for each mechanism (such as high or low excitability, corresponding to normal or ischemic tissue, spiral tip trajectory types, and tissue structures such as rotational anisotropy and periodic boundary conditions). Each mechanism is compared with data from other ionic models or experiments to illustrate that they are not model-specific phenomena. The fact that many different breakup mechanisms exist has important implications for antiarrhythmic drug design and for comparisons of fibrillation experiments using different species, electromechanical uncoupling drugs, and initiation protocols.

Control of waves, patterns and turbulence in chemical systems

Oscillatory clusters are sets of domains in which nearly all elements in a given domain oscillate with the same amplitude and phase1,2,3,4. They play an important role in understanding coupled neuron systems5,6,7,8. In the simplest case, a system consists of two clusters that oscillate in antiphase and can each occupy multiple fixed spatial domains. Examples of cluster behaviour in extended chemical systems are rare, but have been shown to resemble standing waves9,10,11,12,13, except that they lack a characteristic wavelength. Here we report the observation of so-called ‘localized clusters’—periodic antiphase oscillations in one part of the medium, while the remainder appears uniform—in the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction–diffusion system with photochemical global feedback. We also observe standing clusters with fixed spatial domains that oscillate periodically in time and occupy the entire medium, and irregular clusters with no periodicity in either space or time, with standing clusters transforming into irregular clusters and then into localized clusters as the strength of the global negative feedback is gradually increased. By incorporating the effects of global feedback into a model of the reaction, we are able to simulate successfully the experimental data.

Oscillatory cluster patterns in a homogeneous chemical system with global feedback

http://www.matjazperc.com/publications/PhysLettA_372_5681.pdf

Delay-enhanced coherence of spiral waves in noisy Hodgkin Huxley neuronal networks

Among heterogeneously catalyzed chemical reactions, the CO oxidation on the Pt(110) surface under vacuum conditions offers probably the greatest wealth of spontaneous formation of spatial patterns. Spirals, fronts, and solitary pulses were detected at low surface temperatures (T<500 K), in line with the standard phenomenology of bistable, excitable, and oscillatory reaction-diffusion systems. At high temperatures (T greater, similar 540 K), more surprising features like chemical turbulence and standing waves appeared in the experiments. Herein, we study a realistic reaction-diffusion model of this system, with respect to the latter phenomena. In particular, we deal both with the influence of global coupling through the gas phase on the oscillatory reaction and the possibility of wave instabilities under excitable conditions. Gas-phase coupling is shown to either synchronize the oscillations or to yield turbulence and standing structures. The latter findings are closely related to clustering in networks of coupled oscillators and indicate a dominance of the global gas-phase coupling over local coupling via surface diffusion. In the excitable regime wave instabilities in one and two dimensions have been discovered. In one dimension, pulses become unstable due to a vanishing of the refractory zone. In two dimensions, turbulence can also emerge due to spiral breakup, which results from a violation of the dispersion relation.

Chemical turbulence and standing waves in a surface reaction model: The influence of global coupling and wave instabilities

In recent years, the effect of global coupling on spatiotemporal pattern formation in oscillatory media has attracted considerable interest. For the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation, modified by a global coupling term, we derive a criterion for cluster formation and discuss standing wave solutions with an intrinsic wavelength in the Benjamin-Feir stable parameter range. We argue that clustering expresses the dominance of global coupling. In two-dimensional media the interplay between the standing wave instability and anisotropic diffusion may generate stripe patterns coupled to a spatially uniform oscillating mode. Then, by direct numerical simulation, we show that the globally coupled reconstruction model—proposed by Krischer, Eiswirth, and Ertl for CO oxidation on Pt(110) [Surf. Sci. 900, 251 (1991)]—exhibits clustering and predicts the presence of standing waves with an intrinsic wavelength.

M. Neufeld

Papers

Chemical turbulence and standing waves in a surface reaction model: The influence of global coupling and wave instabilities

Cluster formation, standing waves, and stripe patterns in oscillatory active media with local and global coupling.