A coupled system of PDEs and ODEs arising in electrocardiograms modelling

We study the well-posedness of a coupled system of PDEs and ODEs arising in the numerical simulation of electrocardiograms. It consists of a system of degenerate reaction-diffusion equations, the so-called bidomain equations, governing the electrical activity of the heart, and a diffusion equation governing the potential in the surrounding tissues. Global existence of weak solutions is proved for an abstract class of ionic models including Mitchell-Schaeffer, FitzHugh-Nagumo, Aliev-Panfilov and MacCulloch. Uniqueness is proved in the case of the FitzHugh-Nagumo ionic model. The proof is based on a regularisation argument with a Faedo-Galerkin/compactness procedure

Well-posedness for a modified bidomain model describing bioelectric activity in damaged heart tissues

We prove the existence and the uniqueness of a solution for a modified bidomain model, describing the electrical behaviour of the cardiac tissue in pathological situations. The main idea is to reduce the problem to an abstract parabolic setting, which requires to introduce several auxiliary differential systems and a non-standard bilinear form. The main difficulties are due to the degeneracy of the bidomain system and to its non-standard coupling with the diffusion equation