Physics of Cardiac Arrhythmias

``... From making the cure of a disease
More grievous than its endurance
Good Lord, deliver us.''

~ Robert Hutchinson

``O heart, small urn
of porphyry, agate or cornelian,
how imperceptibly the grain tell
between a heart-beat of pleasure
and a heart-beat of pain"

~ Hilda Doolittle

For details on my work on devising a control algorithm for ventricular fibrillation, go to the page on Eliminating Spiral Turbulence in a model of Ventricular Fibrillation. This is work I did at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore - jointly with Rahul Pandit and Ashwin Pande (now at the U. Maryland, College Park).

The research project I was involved with David Christini at the Weill Medical College of New York City involved looking at the spatio-temporal dynamics of pacing termination of ventricular tachycardia.
Recently I have continued investigation of the conditions under which reentry (the underlying cause of tachycardia) may be terminated by pacing. In joint work with Johannes Breuer, we found that dynamics of wave propagation in cardiac tissue can produce temporary heterogeneities that play a key role in deciding the success of pacing treatment.
Click here for a MATLAB program of Luo-Rudy phase I (1991) model for a single cell.
Currently I am working on single-site control of spatiotemporal chaos in Ventricular Fibrillation (page in preparation).

``Inferior doctors treat the full-blown disease,
Mediocre doctors treat the disease before it is manifested,
Superior doctors prevent the disease.''

~ Ancient Chinese proverb