20. Nov 2019
Cardiac fibrillation : an interdisciplinary puzzle
Datum: 20. November 2019 |
15:00 –
16:00
Sprecher:
Guillaume Attuel, Centre de recherches INRIA
Veranstaltungsort: Mondi Seminar Room 3, Central Building
Recently (10.3389/fphys.2017.01139 and 10.3389/fphys.2019.00480), we have provided evidence and modeling which clash with the accepted wisdom. Incompatibility is uncovered in recordings of the electrical activity of fibrillating human hearts, because multifractal scaling is found, with which the model shows excellent quantitative agreement.
The model focuses on a kinetic instability of junctional channels generating a chaotic modulation of conductance. The important multifractal parameter is related to the variance of the strong capacitive electric field, building up across cell junctions.
If this is true, during fibrillation, electric recordings have been mistakenly taken for cardiac action potentials instead of a mixture with capacitive currents, invalidating in practice a host of methods for signal visualization and interpretation.
A puzzle, common to cardiac recordings and time series in the model, which comes as a surprise, is the absence of log-correlations. Beside being mathematically challenging to understand, this trait imposes strict constraints about the possible underlying mechanism.
In this respect, the model also puts under scrutiny unknown mechanisms of the biology of connexins, the ubiquitous proteins which make up gap junction channels.