Abstract
Myocardial tissue is an excitable medium through which propagate waves of electrical stimulation and muscular contraction. In addition to radially expanding waves of neuromuscular activity characterizing the normal heartbeat, myocardial tissue may also support high frequency, rotating spiral waves of activity which are associated with cardiac pathologies (flutter and fibrillation). Recently Pertsov, Ermakova and Panfilov have presented a numerical study of rotating spiral waves in a two-dimensional excitable medium modeled on the FitzHugh-Nagumo equations, suitably modified to reflect the electrical properties of myocardium. We show that some of their principal numerical results can be reproduced in quantitative detail by a general theory of rotating spiral waves in excitable media. The critical ingredients of our theory are the dispersion of nonlinear plane waves and the effects of curvature on the propagation of wave fronts in two-dimensional media. The close comparison of our analytical results with numerical simulations of the full reaction-diffusion equations lends credence to our theoretical description of spiral waves in excitable media.
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