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Updated: Aug 16, 2026

Patient-specific Modeling of the Heart: Estimation of Ventricular Fiber Orientations
Published on: January 8, 2013
Dynamics of conduction blocks in a model of paced cardiac tissue
Hervé Henry1, Wouter-Jan Rappel
1Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, University of California-San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.
Abstract:
We study numerically the dynamics of conduction blocks using a detailed electrophysiological model. We find that this dynamics depends critically on the size of the paced region. Small pacing regions lead to stationary conduction blocks while larger pacing regions can lead to conduction blocks that travel periodically towards the pacing region. We show that this size-dependence dynamics can lead to a novel arrhythmogenic mechanism. Furthermore, we show that the essential phenomena can be captured in a much simpler coupled-map model.
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