A New Method to Analyze Heart Culture Arrhythmia - IDSS 2016 - The 13th International Dead Sea Symposium, March 6-9, 2016, David Intercontinental Convention Center, Tel Aviv The 13th International Dead Sea Symposium (IDSS) on Innovations in Cardiac Arrhythmias and Device Therapy

Avinoam Rabinovitch ¹ Yaacov Biton ¹ Doron Braunstein ³ Menahem Friedman ⁴ Ira Aviram ¹ Omer Berenfeld ² S.V. Pandit ²

¹Physics, Ben-Gurion University
²Center for Arrhythmia Research, University of Michigan
³Physics, Sami Shamoon College of Engineering
⁴Information Systems Engineering, Ben-Gurion University

Aims: To highlight the inherent patterns and study the question of how a fibrillating heart can be driven and operated by a single source, notably a spiral.

Methods and Results: Singular value decomposition (SVD) analysis was applied to an experimental model of fluorescence-based mapping of cardiac fibrillation in cells culture.

We demonstrate how usage of the SVD method is able to demarcate regions harboring drivers (spirals, having high “ranking”) and regions of influenced activity (with low ranking). The analysis further enhances the wave breaking in the transfer region (See Fig.1).

A Granger causality analysis (GCA) is applied to the leading normal modes of the SVD analysis and its results demonstrate that indeed the spiral modes are the dominant ones, driving the modes into other parts of the culture.

Conclusions: These results are of importance for better understanding of the dynamics of excitation in heart fibrillation. They demonstrate the importance of a driving rotor, rather than the assumption of ectopic target wave source, as the leading drivers of fibrillation. Note that, in the original videos prior to the SVD-GCA analysis, it is impossible to discern between a rotor and an ectopic source.