An Explicit Space-time Adaptive Method for Simulating Complex Cardiac Dynamics

Abstract

For plane-wave and many-spiral states of the experimentally based Luo-Rudy 1 model of heart tissue in large (8 cm square) domains, we show that an explicit space-time-adaptive time-integration algorithm can achieve an order of magnitude reduction in computational effort and memory - but without a reduction in accuracy - when compared to an algorithm using a uniform space-time mesh at the finest resolution. Our results indicate that such an explicit algorithm can be extended straightforwardly to simulate quantitatively large-scale three-dimensional electrical dynamics over the whole human heart.