Copyright © 1997 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The propagation of electrical activity in cardiac tissue can be modelled by reaction diffusion equations, where a tensor of diffusion coefficients represents anisotropy due to fiber orintation, and excitation is represented by high-order, stiff differential systems. The effects of external electrical stimulation, as in artifical pacemakers, or in defibrillators, requires bidomain models, in wich intra- and extracellular currents are treated separately.

simplified approaches are taken to this problem to illustrate two methods of defibrillation: by a sinhle large pulse, that eliminates all propagating activity, and by a series of smaller amplitude perturbations, that drive out re-entrant sources of excitation.