A Simple Computational Model of Light-sensitive Cardiac tissue for Simulation of the optogenetic Defibrillation

Abstract

Atrial and ventricular fibrillations are two types of severe heart arrhythmias. As have claimed in Karathanos et al. (2014 and 2016), and Boyle et al. (2015) optogenetic treatments are considered as a convincing substitute for cardiac therapies. However, investigating these techniques under different constraints and the condition of in vivo testing is not always straight-forward. Computational modeling can be used as the first step before any experimental study. The objective of this study is to modify and simplify an already developed cardiac cell model of Ten Tusscher in order to simulating an optogenetic cardiac tissue in silico. In the original model Action Potential (AP) generation in each cardiac cell is described by a dynamic model of order 17. We estimated the parameters of a second-order Aliev-Panfilov model such that it can mimic the behavior of both light-sensitive and normal cardiac cells. Then we showed that the electrophysiological behavior of the new model of the tissue (consisted of 128*128 cells) is similar to the original complex model. The criteria for comparing the behavior of the two models is their ability to generate the spiral waves representing cardiac tissue fibrillation and also the characteristics of these spiral waves. Afterwards, the model is used to predict the propagation of the spiral waves on the tissue, and to describe the function of the optogenetic cells used to defibrillate a stable-induced spiral wave.