1 research outputs found
Analysis of cardiac arrhythmia sources using Feynman diagrams
The contraction of the heart muscle is triggered by self-organizing
electrical patterns. Abnormalities in these patterns lead to cardiac
arrhythmias, a prominent cause of mortality worldwide. The targeted treatment
or prevention of arrhythmias requires a thorough understanding of the
interacting wavelets, vortices and conduction block sites within the excitation
pattern. Currently, there is no conceptual framework that covers the elementary
processes during arrhythmogenesis in detail, in particular the transient
pivoting patterns observed in patients, which can be interleaved with periods
of less fragmented waves. Here, we provide such a framework in terms of
quasiparticles and Feynman diagrams, which were originally developed in
theoretical physics. We identified three different quasiparticles in excitation
patterns: heads, tails and pivots. In simulations and experiments, we show that
these basic building blocks can combine into at least four different bound
states. By representing their interactions as Feynman diagrams, the creation
and annihilation of rotor pairs are shown to be sequences of dynamical
creation, annihilation and recombination of the identified quasiparticles. Our
results provide a new theoretical foundation for a more detailed theory,
analysis and mechanistic insights of topological transitions in excitation
patterns, to be applied within and beyond the context of cardiac
electrophysiology