Modeling and numerical simulation of action potentials in human atrial tissues

Electrophysiology of the heart is the subject of a vast interdisciplinary literature, from medical sciences through bio-engineering, physiology, chemistry and physics. The difficulty in having access to direct measures on real patients entailed the coupling of such studies with numerical simulations. Several works have been done on this topic, focusing mainly on the behavior of the ventricles. In this paper we focus on atrial simulation: we present a reaction-diffusion model coupled with the simple FitzHugh-Nagumo (FHN) model and the more complex Courtemanche-Ramirez-Nattel (CRN) model, which has been derived explicitely for human atrial cells. Numerical experiments are performed with both the bidomain and the monodomain models to simulate the evolution of a complete heartbeat.