A comparison of the Bidomain and the adapted monodomain models in electro-cardiology

Charles Pierre (1) , Yves Bourgault (2)

1 LMAP - Laboratoire de Mathématiques et de leurs Applications [Pau]
2 Department of Mathematics and Statistics [Ottawa]

In this paper we compare two commonly used models in electro-cardiology: the bidomain and the (adapted) monodomain models. These models are used to simulate spreading of excitation and recovery in myocardial tissues including anisotropic conduction due to muscular fiber rotations. The comparison is held numerically considering the activation time mappings predicted by the two models. Two test cases are considered: firstly a two-dimensional academic test case and secondly a realistic setting involving a complex geometry of the ventricles based on a medical image segmentation and rotating anisotropy. To distinguish between the error induced by the discretisation and the discrepancy between the models, a convergence numerical study is made. From these numerical studies two facts are drawn: the discrepancy between the two models is quite small (of order or below 1\%) and smaller than the discretisation error for commonly ran simulations in biomedical engineering.

Domains: Numerical Analysis [math.NA]

Charles Pierre, Yves Bourgault. A comparison of the Bidomain and the adapted monodomain models in electro-cardiology. 2010. ⟨hal-00545888v1⟩