Characterization and modeling of the peripheral cardiac conduction system.

The development of biophysical models of the heart has the potential to get insights in the patho-physiology of the heart, which requires to accurately modeling anatomy and function. The electrical activation sequence of the ventricles depends strongly on the cardiac conduction system (CCS). Its morphology and function cannot be observed in vivo, and therefore data available come from histological studies. We present a review on data available of the peripheral CCS including new experiments. In order to build a realistic model of the CCS we designed a procedure to extract morphological characteristics of the CCS from stained calf tissue samples. A CCS model personalized with our measurements has been built using L-systems. The effect of key unknown parameters of the model in the electrical activation of the left ventricle has been analyzed. The CCS models generated share the main characteristics of observed stained Purkinje networks. The timing of the simulated electrical activation sequences were in the physiological range for CCS models that included enough density of PMJs. These results show that this approach is a potential methodology for collecting knowledge-domain data and build improved CCS models of the heart automatically.