A new computational approach for electrical analysis of biological tissues.

A new computational approach for electrical analysis especially designed for application in biological tissues is presented. It is based on the modelling of the electrical properties of the medium by means of lumped circuit elements, such as capacitance, conductance and current sources. The cell scale model is suitable for modelling the local anisotropy around cell membranes. It permits to obtain the electric potential, ionic concentrations and current densities around cells in time steps in an iterative process. The tissue scale model utilises volume-averaged values of conductivity and permittivity and models suitably the dispersive characteristic of biological tissues. It permits to obtain potential and current distributions in large volumes of tissue in the time or frequency domain. An example of analysis of skeletal muscle is presented aiming to demonstrate the features of the method.