Ode-based Multiscale Approach to modeling Cardiac Contraction
by
John Rice
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Coauthors: Jagir Hussan, Yuhia Tu, Gustavo Stolovitzky and Pieter de Tombe

Cardiac modeling has evolved greatly in the last 45 years to improve the level of sophistication and accuracy of mathematical models. Important challenges still remain in representing the contraction force of cardiac muscle cells. Specifically, emergent, macroscopic behaviors result from molecular-level mechanisms that can only be directly modeled at the subcellular scale, even with the largest of existing supercomputers. However, the cardiac modeling community desires to model at the level of the whole organ that more closely represents clinically relevant situations. To bridge the extreme differences in scale from the molecular to the organ level, we develop a point model of the cardiac myofilament based on ordinary differential equations (ODEs). The model includes several phenomenological approximations that attempt to represent spatial interactions without explicit and costly computation that typically require partial differential equations or Monte Carlo approaches. The talk will cover the development of the ODE-based model and compare results with experimental characterizations in real muscle. In addition, the results will be compared to models based on traditional approaches.

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Date received: August 31, 2007