Eliminating spiral wave and spatiotemporal chaos in cardiac tissues by suppressing the rotation of spiral wave tip

Abstract

The variation of the function of sodium channel in cardiomyocyte is associated with multiple cardiac diseases. Increasing sodium channel availability can effectively increase sodium influx, leading to enhanced cardiomyocyte excitability, prolonged action potential duration and late sodium current activity, which may cause ventricular arrhythmia. On the other hand, enhancing cardiomyocyte excitability can effectively increase the conduction velocity of the medium in the rotation center of spiral wave, which can restrain the rotation of spiral wave, leading to the disappearance of spiral wave. However, how to increase the excitability of cardiomyocytes while avoiding arrhythmias has not yet been explored so far. In this paper, we study how to regulate the changes of sodium current in cardiac myocytes to control spiral wave and spatiotemporal chaos in a two-dimensional cardiac tissues by using the Luo-Rudy phase I model. We propose such a sodium current control scheme:when the cell is excited, the regulation of sodium current begins. If the absolute value of sodium current obtained from the model equation is less than the absolute value of sodium current control threshold, the sodium current is simply equal to the control threshold of sodium current. In other cases, the absolute value of sodium current cannot exceed the maximum value without control. When the membrane potential rises over-5 mV, the sodium current evolves naturally. This method of regulating sodium current ensures that all cells have almost the same amplitude of sodium current, while without obviously changing the excitation-time. All cells thus have the same excitability under the control of sodium current, so that the excitation of cell is less affected by spiral wave tip. The numerical simulation results show that as long as the control threshold of sodium current reaches a critical value, the rotation of spiral wave tip is effectively suppressed, causing spiral wave to move out of the system boundary and spatiotemporal chaos to disappear after it has evolved into a spiral wave. If the absolute value of sodium current control threshold is large enough, the spiral wave and spatiotemporal chaos would also disappear through conductive block. These results can provide a new idea for antiarrhythmic therapy.