A Simple Model for Identifying Critical Structures in Atrial Fibrillation

Abstract

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common abnormal heart rhythm and the single biggest cause of stroke. Ablation, destroying regions of the atria, is applied largely empirically and can be curative but with a disappointing clinical success rate. We design a simple model of activation wavefront propagation on a structure mimicking the branching network architecture of heart muscle and show how AF emerges spontaneously as age-related parameters change. We identify regions responsible for the initiation and maintenance of AF, the ablation of which terminates AF. The simplicity of the model allows us to calculate analytically the risk of arrhythmia. This analytical result allows us to locate the transition in parameter space and highlights that the transition from regular to fibrillatory behaviour is a finite-size effect present in systems of any size. These clinically testable predictions might inform ablation therapies and arrhythmic risk assessment.

5 pages, 4 figures. For supplementary materials please contact Kishan A. Manani at [email protected]

References in corpus (1)

• Computation of the response functions of spiral waves in active media

Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Myocardial Architecture and Patient Variability in Clinical Patterns of Atrial Fibrillation
• Unified Mechanism of Atrial Fibrillation in a Simple Model
• Cardiac Reentry Modeled by Spatiotemporal Chaos in a Coupled Map Lattice
• Approximate Bayesian Computation with Path Signatures
• Understanding the transition from paroxysmal to persistent atrial fibrillation from micro-anatomical re-entry in a simple model