Electrophysiological modelling of hearts with diseases

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In the United Kingdom alone, there are about 1.5 million people living with the burden of a heart disease. Unfortunately, the exact mechanisms by which heart failure occurs are poorly understood. The goals of this project include designing more efficient algorithms for numerical simulation of the electrical behaviour of hearts with diseases on cell, tissue and on whole-organ levels. At present numerical simulations of cardiac activity are computationally expensive as a huge disparity in spatial and temporal scales between relatively slow mechanical and much faster electrical processes exists and must be resolved. However, not all electrical behaviour is fast so the project will exploit advances in cardiac asymptotics to develop a reduced kinematic description of propagating electrical signals. These reduced models will be fully coupled to the original partial-differential equations for spatio-temporal evolution of the slow nonlinear dynamic fields. This will allow significantly larger spatial and time steps to be used in monolithic numerical schemes and pave the way for clinical applications, particularly coronary perfusion post infarction. The models thus developed will be applied to specific problems of interest, including (1) coupling among myocyte-fibroblast-collagen scar;(2) shape analysis of scar tissue and their effects on electric signal propagation; (3) personalized 3D heart models using human data. The project will require and will develop knowledge of mathematical modelling, asymptotic and numerical methods for PDEs and software development and some basic knowledge of physiology.