OpenLB
Open Library of Bioscience

Ventricular fibrillation (VF) is the main cause of sudden death in cardiovascular diseases. The effects of electrophysiological heterogeneity and dynamic factors bring a lot of difficulties in understanding and revealing the mechanisms of VF. Cardiac short-term memory is one of the factors that make invalidation of restitution curve slope as the criteria for transition from ventricular tachycardia to VF. Therefore, investigation of inherent properties of short-term memory and its role in VF has great significance. In this paper we took advantage of the perturbed down-sweep protocol to measure dynamic and local S1S2 restitution curves on three widely used mathematical models to reveal their memory property. And by making abrupt change of the stimulation cycle length, we examined the attenuation process of the memory. The results showed, the rate-dependent action potendial duration (APD) is related with S1 pacing. The APD difference under different S2 cycle length is more pronounced with short S1 cycle length. Except the Luo-Rudy 1991 model, the Luo-Rudy 1994 and Noble 1991 models can at least reflect some of the short-term memory. And the memory attenuated in exponential way. Therefore, in quantitative electrophysiological study, these two models can be used in the future for investigating the characteristics of the short-term memory and its contribution to VF.