Long-Time Simulations on High Resolution Meshes to Model Calcium Waves in a Heart Cell

Abstract. A model for the flow of calcium in an atrial heart cell is given by a system of timedependent reaction-diffusion equations coupled by non-linear reaction terms. Calcium ions enter into the cell at release units distributed throughout the cell. At each position, the probability for calcium to be released increases along with the concentration of calcium, thus creating a feedback loop of waves re-generating themselves repeatedly. To validate the model, simulations on the time scale of several completed waves and on the spatial scale of the entire cell are desirable. This requires long-time studies on spatial meshes that need to have a high resolution to resolve the positions of the calcium release units throughout the entire cell. high resolution meshes needed to resolve the We detail the development of a special-purpose numerical method and parallel implementation for this problem. Parallel performance studies demonstrate the scalability of the implementation on a distributed-...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: SIAMSC
• Authors: Matthias K. Gobbert
• Keywords: Calcium, Cell, Entire Cell, SIAMSC 2008