Stochastic dynamics of phase singularities under ventricular fibrillation in 2D Beeler-Reuter model

Abstract

The dynamics of ventricular fibrillation (VF) has been studied extensively, and the initiation mechanism of VF has been elucidated to some extent. However, the stochastic dynamical nature of sustained VF remains unclear so far due to the complexity of high dimensional chaos in a heterogeneous system. In this paper, various statistical mechanical properties of sustained VF are studied numerically in 2D Beeler-Reuter-Drouhard-Roberge (BRDR) model with normal and modified ionic current conductance. The nature of sustained VF is analyzed by measuring various fluctuations of spatial phase singularity (PS) such as velocity, lifetime, the rates of birth and death. It is found that the probability density function (pdf) for lifetime of PSs is independent of system size. It is also found that the hyper-Gamma distribution serves as a universal pdf for the counting number of PSs for various system sizes and various parameters of our model tissue under VF. Further, it is demonstrated that the nonlinear Langevin equation associated with a hyper-Gamma process can mimic the pdf and temporal variation of the number of PSs in the 2D BRDR model. © 2011 Author(s).