Reproducing Experimentally Observed Alternans in Cardiac Tissue Using Fractional Diffusion

Heart disease is the leading cause of mortality in the US, despite the existence of many treatments to aid cardiovascular problems. Alternans of the heart's action potential has been shown to be a dangerous marker for mortality with over 80% of people identified with it dying within 2 years if not treated. Experimental studies have shown how alternans in space can lead to the initiation of complex arrhythmias because of the spatiotemporal dispersion in refractoriness they produce. Computational studies have shown mechanisms behind the dynamics of alternans, however to date they fail to reproduce the dynamics quantitatively, requiring much larger tissue domains compared with experiments. In this talk we argue that the voltage propagation in cardiac tissue in the mesoscopic scale can be described by fractional diffusion and this allows for models to be fitted in tissue sizes as in experiments.