Analysis of cardiac arrhythmia sources using Feynman diagrams

Abstract

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