Prof Kevin Burrage (University of Oxford, UK & Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia) visited our group and gave a talk on "Exploring variability in cardiac electrophysiology mechanisms through mathematical modelling".
This talk gives an overview on two different approaches for understanding and quantifying the underlying variability in cardiac electrophysiology. In the first part I will discuss the role of populations of models in characterising individual myocyte cell variability and how we can use probabilistic modelling to gain greater insights into the mechanisms underlying variability in the heart. In the second part I will discuss the use of non-local or fractional models for taking into account the heterogeneous nature of cardiac tissue. We will show how model parameters can be extracted from a variety of data sources including a heart in a dish, ECGs and Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance Images. Using clinical data we will attempt to construct spatial biomarkers for understanding the disease of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that occurs through enlargement of the heart and the disarray of cardiac fibres.
This is joint work with Dr Alfonso Bueno-Orovio, Professor Blanca Rodriguez, Dr David Kay and Professor Vicente Grau (Oxford)