Evaluation of numerical methods and computational techniques for solving cardiac cell models

Abstract

The modeling of the electrical activity of the heart is of great medical and scientific interest as it provides a way to better understand the underlying biophysical phenomena, allows the development of new techniques for diagnoses and serves as a platform for drug tests. At a cellular level, the electrical activity may be simulated by solving a system of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) describing the electrical behavior of the cell membrane. Because the biophysical processes underlying this phenomenon are non-linear and change very rapidly, the ODE system is challenging to solve numerically. The aim of this work is to evaluate the performance of the computational techniques called Partial Evaluation and Lookup Tables in a classical explicit numerical method as well as in a more sophisticated implicit scheme to solve the system of ODEs that models the electrical activity of cardiac myocytes.