Development of a human body model for numerical calculation of electrical fields

Knowledge of the distribution of electrical fields in the human body is of importance for scientists, engineers and physicians. This paper shows one way to achieve this knowledge by numerical calculation based on macroscopic models of the human body. An anatomical model is created by preprocessing, segmentation and classification of the digital images within the Visible Man data set. Conductivity models are derived, which describe the distribution of electrical conductivity in the human body. A conductivity model is applied to solve an exemplary forward problem in electrophysiology, which consist of the calculation of the electrical field distribution arising from cardiac sources. The cardiac sources are obtained by a model of the excitation process within the heart. The calculation of electrical fields is carried out numerically by employing the finite difference method.