Avaliação da influência da estrutura vascular no processo de desfibrilação cardíaca via simulações computacionais

Abstract

The ventricular fibrillation is a cardiac arrhythmia listed as one of the leading causes of death within the industrialized world, hence the study of cardiac electrical behavior is an important research area. The most used equipment for the reversal of this condition is the defibrillator, which subjects the patient's chest to a high-energy electric field. However, it can have serious effects such as burns and severe pain. Less aggressive techniques have been studied and considered, for example, protocols with multiple low energy stimuli. It was observed that, in this alternative technique, the cardiac vascular network may play an important role in relation to the spatial-temporal patterns generated by the stimuli. This work presents a computational study about the influence of the vascular network during electrical field stimuli in cardiac tissues. The phenomenon is described by a nonlinear system of partial differential equations. To solve this model numerically the Finite Volume Method (FVM) and the Phase-Field Method (PFM) were combined, thus seeking a better geometric characterization of arterial vessels during simulations of cardiac tissue defibrillation. The results obtained in this work suggest that these methods (FVM + PFM) are suitable for the protocol study for cardiac defibrillation.