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New Engineering Approaches To Arrhythmias And Myocardial Infarction, Frency Varghese

Biomedical Engineering Theses & Dissertations

In this thesis, we present new engineering approaches to several important cardiac diseases. Chapter 1 considers the dynamics of arrhythmias. The most dangerous arrhythmias are reentrant arrhythmias, including ventricular fibrillation and ventricular tachycardia. During these arrhythmias, there are one or several rotating excitation waves present in the heart. Because of their shape, these waves are called scroll waves; their center of rotation is a one-dimensional curve called the filament. Filaments largely constrain the configuration of a scroll wave but are much simpler, so much effort has gone into describing scroll wave dynamics in terms of the dynamics of their filaments. …