Acknowledgments The authors thank Audrys G. Pauza, MSc, for his graphical assistance in preparing this chapter. The authors are also exceptionally grateful to Prof. José Jalife for his careful reading of the manuscript and friendly editorial assistance. Funding for this…
Cardiac fibrillation is an electromechanical dysfunction of the heart that is driven by complex three-dimensional (3D) electrical excitation waves, resulting in incoherent mechanical contraction, loss of pumping function, and risk of sudden cardiac death. The dynamics of vortex-like rotating waves…
Acknowledgments This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (U01-HL141074). Introduction Aging Heart The aging heart is characterized by a number of morphologic and structural changes manifested at the different levels of biologic hierarchy. These changes lead to…
Introduction Experimental and clinical data from a number of laboratories support the hypothesis that both acute and persistent atrial fibrillation (AF) in some animal models and groups of human patients is not random. Studies analyzing the spatiotemporal organization of waves…
Introduction Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is a common yet challenging genetic heart disease with a prevalence of 1 in 500 people. It is characterized by an unexplained thickened heart muscle. It is a major cause of sudden cardiac death (SCD) in…
Acknowledgment We thank Vadim N. Biktashev, Alexander Teplenin, and Enid Van Nieuwenhuyse for help in preparation of the manuscript. The main physiologic function of the heart is to pump blood through the circulatory system. This pumping function is controlled by…
The microarchitecture of cellular substructures involved in calcium signaling is highly organized in all forms of mammalian striated muscle, and the cardiac ventricular myocyte (VM) is no exception. The ultrastructural characteristics of the T-tubular system and sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) play…
Introduction The electrical activity underlying the cardiac action potential emerges from a complicated process. It involves a large number of proteins including ionic channels and transporters that often have nonlinear dependencies on components such as the transmembrane potential and the…
Acknowledgments Dr. Sobie is supported by the National Institutes of Health (U54 HG008098 and U01 HL136297), the National Science Foundation (MCB 1615677), and the US Food and Drug Administration (75F40119C10021). Torsades de pointes (TdP) is a potentially lethal polymorphic ventricular…
Acknowledgments This work was supported by National Institutes of Health grants R01HL105983, R01HL142498, and R01HL146107 to G.I.F. and R01HL132073 to D.S.P. The cardiac conduction system (CCS) consists of the impulse generating but slowly conducting sinoatrial node (SAN) and atrioventricular node…