Coupled Eikonal problems to model cardiac reentries in Purkinje network and myocardium

Abstract

We propose a novel partitioned scheme based on Eikonal equations to model the coupled propagation of the electrical signal in the His-Purkinje system and in the myocardium for cardiac electrophysiology. This scheme allows, for the first time in Eikonal-based modeling, to capture all possible signal reentries between the Purkinje network and the cardiac muscle that may occur under pathological conditions. As part of the proposed scheme, we introduce a new pseudo-time method for the Eikonal-diffusion problem in the myocardium, to correctly enforce electrical stimuli coming from the Purkinje network. We test our approach by performing numerical simulations of cardiac electrophysiology in a real biventricular geometry, under both pathological and therapeutic conditions, to demonstrate its flexibility, robustness, and accuracy.