Computational study of the wave propagation in three-dimensional human cardiac tissue

We developed a three dimensional cardiac tissue model based on human cardiac cell and mono-domain approximation for action potential propagation. The human myocyte model proposed by ten Tusscher et al. (TNNP model) (2004) for cell electrophysiology and a mono-domain method for electric wave propagation are used to simulate the cardiac tissue propagation mechanism using a finite element method. To delineate non-homogeneity across cardiac tissue layer, we used three types of cardiac cell models. Ansiotropic effect of action potential propagation is also considered in this study. In this 3D anisotropic cardiac tissue with three cell layers, we generated a reentrant wave using S1-S2 protocol. Computational results showed that the reentrant wave was affected by the anisotropic properties of the cells. To test the reentrant wave under pathological state, we simulated a hypertopic model with non-excitable fibroblasts in stochastic manner. Compared with normal tissue, the hypertropic tissue result showed another center of reentrant wave, indicating that the wave pattern can be more easily changed from regular with a concentric focus to irregular multi-focused reentrant waves in case of patients with hypertrophy.