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Towards the Emulation of the Cardiac Conduction System for Pacemaker Validation

Published: 23 July 2018 Publication History

Abstract

The heart is a vital organ that relies on the orchestrated propagation of electrical stimuli to coordinate each heartbeat. Abnormalities in the heart’s electrical behaviour can be managed with a cardiac pacemaker. Recently, the closed-loop testing of pacemakers with an emulation (real-time simulation) of the heart has been proposed. This enables developers to interrogate their pacemaker design without having to engage in costly or lengthy clinical trials. Many high-fidelity heart models have been developed, but are too computationally intensive to be simulated in real-time. Heart models, designed specifically for the closed-loop testing of pacemaker logic, are too abstract to be useful for the testing of pacemaker implementations.
In the context of pacemaker testing, compared to high-fidelity heart models, this article presents a more computationally efficient heart model that generates realistic piecewise continuous electrical signals. The heart model is composed of cardiac cells that are connected by paths. Our heart model is based on the Stony Brook cardiac cell model and the UPenn path model, and improves them by stabilising the activation behaviour of the cells and by capturing the piecewise continuous behaviour of electrical propagation. We provide simulation results that show our ability to faithfully model a range of arrhythmias, such as VA conduction, heart blocks, and long Q-T syndrome. Moreover, re-entrant circuits (that cause arrhythmia) can be faithfully modelled, which only the discrete-event UPenn heart model is also able to achieve.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems
ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems  Volume 2, Issue 4
Special Issue on Medical CPS Papers
October 2018
313 pages
ISSN:2378-962X
EISSN:2378-9638
DOI:10.1145/3236466
  • Editor:
  • Tei-Wei Kuo
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 23 July 2018
Accepted: 01 August 2017
Revised: 01 May 2017
Received: 01 July 2016
Published in TCPS Volume 2, Issue 4

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Author Tags

  1. Cardiac
  2. electrophysiology
  3. emulation

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  • (2022)Simplifying the Process of Going From Cells to Tissues Using Statistical MechanicsFrontiers in Physiology10.3389/fphys.2022.83702713Online publication date: 25-Mar-2022
  • (2022)A Reaction-Diffusion Heart Model for the Closed-Loop Evaluation of Heart-Pacemaker InteractionIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2022.322283010(121249-121260)Online publication date: 2022
  • (2020)Cardiac Electrical Modeling for Closed-Loop Validation of Implantable DevicesIEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering10.1109/TBME.2019.291721267:2(536-544)Online publication date: Feb-2020
  • (2020)Closing the Loop: Validation of Implantable Cardiac Devices With Computational Heart ModelsIEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics10.1109/JBHI.2019.294700724:6(1579-1588)Online publication date: Jun-2020
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