Computing the Electrical Activity in the Heart

ISBN-13: 9783642070051 / Angielski / Miękka / 2010 / 318 str.

Joakim Sundnes; Glenn Terje Lines; Xing Cai

Opis

The heart is a fantastic machine; during a normal lifetime it beats about 2.5 billion times and pumps 200.000 tons of blood through an enormous system of vessels extending 160.000 kilometres throughout the body. For centuries, man has tried to understand how the heart works, but there remain many unsolved problems, problems that have captured the attention of thousands of researchers worldwide. There is, for example, a huge amount of research being devoted to the analysis of single heart cells. Other areas of research include trying to understand how it works as a complete muscle, and how blood ows through the heart. The entire process is extremely complex. The history of bioelectricity can be traced back to the late eighteenth century and the experiments of Luigi Galvani. A century later, in 1887, Augustus Wallers managed to measure the electrical signal generated by the heart at the surface of the body 142]. His dog Jimmy earned a place in history by being the rst to have his heart measured in this way; see Figure 1.1. In 1903 Willem Einthoven 34] - veloped the rst commercial device for recording electrocardiograms (ECGs); see Figure 1.2.

Spis treści

Physiological Background.- Mathematical Models.- Computational Models.- Solving Linear Systems.- Solving Systems of ODEs.- Large-Scale Electrocardiac Simulations.- Inverse Problems.

O autorze

Prof. Aslak Tveito is the managing director of Simula Research Laboratory. His research is focused on computing the electrical activity in the heart.

Blurb

This book describes mathematical models and numerical techniques for simulating the electrical activity in the heart. The book gives an introduction to the most important models of the field, followed by a detailed description of numerical techniques for the models. Particular focus is on efficient numerical methods for large scale simulations on both scalar and parallel computers. The results presented in the book will be of particular interest to researchers in bioengineering and computational biology, who face the challenge of solving these complex mathematical models efficiently. The book will also serve as a valuable introduction to a new and exciting field for computational scientists and applied mathematicians.