Comparative analysis of polymorphic ventricular tachyarrhyhmias and fibrillation: clinical observations and numerical experiments

Spiral waves are known to cause dangerous ventricular tachyarrhythmias (VT) and ventricular fibrillation (VF). In vitro experiments and numerical simulations demonstrate that nonstationary spiral waves that drift or meander along the surface of cardiac tissue, result in the temporal fibrillatory-like irregularities in recorded myocardial electrograms (ECG). However, the correlation between VF-VT reentrant mechanisms remains unclear. Here, the authors use a comparison of the results of computational modeling with data acquired in the clinical electrophysiology laboratory to demonstrate how the fibrillation patterns in human hearts depart from VT reentrant properties approaching complex spatio-temporal irregularities.