Measurement of Tip Trajectories in the Cardiac Reentry

Reentrant impulse in the myocardium is considered to be a major factor promoting electrophysiological abnormalities or even leading to ventricular tachycardias (VTs) and ventricular fibrillations (VFs). Tip trajectory of the reentrant wave can reflect stability of the electrical propagation and area of the reentrant movement, thereby being considered as one of the most concerned parameters in studying electrical activities during VT/VF. The purpose of the present study is to propose a practical method to find out tip trajectories using a computational approach. In this study Luo-Rudy 1991 mathematical model of the ventricular cell was used. The operator splitting method was utilized to integrate the partial differential equations in the two-dimensional tissue. And spiral waves were initiated by the cut wave front technique. Through experiments we found it was difficult to find out the tips by finding intersection of the two isovoltage lines as proposed in most papers. Therefore, we suggested that tip points were detected by seeking the shortest distance of the two adjacent isovoltage contour lines. The results showed that tip trajectories of these spiral waves found in our way were very near to the tips observed, implying validation of our method in measuring tip trajectories in cardiac reentry.