Geometrical Dynamics of Excitation in Heart Muscle and Chemical Models

这个多学科的项目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。它围绕着在静止的三维可激发介质中涡旋线的周期性激活的传播。在正常健康的心肌中，这种自发和致命的周期性可以独立于任何病理而出现，例如，通过电击或机械电击。这种“室颤”及其物理机制与所有其他可兴奋介质有共同的特征，例如在化学凝胶中的“冷火焰”，它在3个维度上传播颜色波。对局部反应和扩散的三维偏微分方程的数值实验也学到了很多东西，这些方程总结了这两种机制(离子通道动力学和生物电势扩散，化学动力学和分子扩散。)多年来，温弗瑞博士的实验室一直在对这三个领域进行研究；他们之间的见解和类比交流在所有三个领域都取得了丰硕成果，这些结果每年被不同领域的其他人作为已发表研究的组成部分被引用-240次，就证明了这一点。

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.