Vortex Filaments in 3 Dimensional Excitable Media

首席研究员将研究三维可兴奋介质，既包括化学反应，也包括与心脏电生理有关的介质。该项目的核心思想是：1)正常心肌是一种可兴奋介质；2)可激介质动力学的某些方面是一般的，特别是它们的涡旋激励；3)这些方面本质上是三维的；4)在心肌中，这些涡旋刺激是导致最严重的心律失常的原因，但在活体心肌中几乎不可能进行三维研究；5)它们可以在计算和化学可激发介质中进行研究，两者都支持类动作电位在三维中的传播；6)这种比较的效用已在二维研究中得到验证；7)机构方程的纯计算应辅以实验；8)这些实验可以通过将现有的光学断层扫描计算程序适应现有的分析和显示数据的计算程序来实现，这些数据目前是由超级计算机解心脏电生理和类似化学动力学的机制方程获得的。研究者将解决机制的“三维”问题，并利用计算机辅助光学断层扫描在模拟这些心律失常的化学介质中观察三维激活波前。目前的项目由美国国家科学基金会的四个项目资助：理论与计算化学、应用与计算数学、生理学和计算生物学活动。

The principal investigator will study three dimensional excitable media, both in terms of chemical reactions but also are related to the electrophysiology of the heart. The key ideas of the project are 1) the normal heart muscle is an excitable medium; 2) some aspects of the dynamics of excitable media are generic, notably their vortex excitations; 3) these aspects are inherently 3-dimensional; 4) in heart muscle these vortex excitations are responsible for the most pernicious arrhythmias, but are almost impossible to study 3-dimensionally in living heart muscle; 5) they can be studied computationally and in chemically excitable media, both of which support action-potential-like propagation in three dimensions; 6) the utility of this comparison has been validated in two dimensional studies; 7) the pure computation for equations of mechanism should be complemented by experiments; 8) such experiments can be implemented by adapting existing computational procedures in optical tomography to existing computational procedures for analysis and display of the data that are currently obtained by supercomputer solution of the mechanistic equations of cardiac electrophysiology and of the analogous chemical kinetics. The investigator will solve the "three- dimensional" for the mechanisms and use computer-assisted optical tomography to observe three dimensional activation wavefronts in the chemical medium during the analog to these arrhythmias. The current project is being supported by four programs at the National Science Foundation: Theoretical and Computational Chemistry, Applied & Computational Mathematics, Physiology, and Computational Biology Activities.