Geometrical Dynamics of Excitation in Heart Muscle and Chemical Models

这个多学科的冒险涉及可兴奋凝胶的物理化学，正常心肌的电生理学，生物工程和应用数学，重点是高性能计算。 它的中心围绕传播的周期性激活从涡旋线在静止的三维可激发介质。 在正常健康的心肌中，这种自发的和致命的周期性可以独立于任何病理而出现，例如，受到电击或机械冲击。 这种“心室颤动”及其物理机制与所有其他可兴奋介质具有共同的特征，例如在三维中传播颜色波的化学凝胶中的“冷火焰”。 从局部反应和扩散的3维偏微分方程的数值实验中也学到了很多东西，这些偏微分方程总结了两种机制（离子通道动力学和生物电势扩散，化学动力学和分子扩散）。 Winfree博士的实验室已经对这三个领域进行了多年的研究;他们之间的见解和类比交流在这三个领域都取得了丰硕的成果，这些成果每年被引用约240次，作为其他领域发表的研究成果的组成部分。

This multi-disciplinary venture involves physical chemistry of excitable gels, electrophysiology of normal heart muscle, bioengineering, and applied mathematics with emphasis on high-performance computation. It centers around the propagation of periodic activations from vortex lines in motionless 3-dimensional excitable media. In normal healthy heart muscle, such spontaneous and lethal periodicity can arise independently of any pathology, e.g., by electrical or mechanical shock. This "ventricular fibrillation" and its physical mechanisms have features in common with all other excitable media, for example "cold flames" in a chemical gel that propagates waves of color in 3 dimensions. Much is also learned from numerical experiments on the 3-dimensional partial differential equations of local reaction and diffusion that summarize both mechanisms (ionic channel dynamics and biolectric potential diffusion in one, chemical kinetics and molecular diffusion in the other.) All three have been under study in Dr. Winfree's laboratory for some years; the exchange of insights and analogies between them has been fruitful for all three areas, as testified by the -240 citations of these results annually as components of published investigations by others in diverse fields.