Modelling the genesis and propagation of electrical activity in the heart in quantitative terms is one of the most important recent applications of mathematical modelling in biology. The main research direction, and the most important for biological and medical applications, is the development of realistic models of electrical activity in cardiac tissue and the whole mammalian heart. Recent progress in nonlinear dynamics, advances in computer technology and experiments on cardiac tissue have made feasible the construction of such models. Computational Biology of the Heart is the first book to provide a comprehensive survey of recent research together with a systematic overview of the subject. The contributions, all written by experts in the different areas of the subject, cover all main aspects of whole heart modelling: from excitation in single cells, to two and three dimensional models of cardiac tissue and the whole heart. Various computational models and techniques are described and then applied to reconstruct and visualise modelled activity in both normal and pathological heart tissues. The models are nonlinear and use techniques of ordinary differential equations, partial differential equations and eikonal equations. The book also provides a review of modelling cardiac contraction, mapping electrical activity from electrocardiograms, and recent experimental observations of wave propagation in the whole heart. Graduate students and researchers in such areas as applied mathematical biology, clinical physiology and cardiology will find this book to be an invaluable resource for their work.

Skrytá bibl. Index: s. 409-416