Abstract
Thus Homer first described a graphic recording from a normal, healthy ventricular wall, presumably ending with fibrillation 3500 years ago during the siege of Bronze-Age Troy by bloodthirsty heroes from Mycenaean Greece.
Then fell Alcathous, son of noble Aesyetes: he was son-in-law to Anchises [the father of Aeneas]... him did Neptune lay low by the hand of Idomeneus [leader of the contingent from Crete], blinding his bright eyes and binding his strong limbs in fetters so that he could neither go back nor to one side, but stood stock still like some pillar or lofty tree when Idomeneus struck him with a spear full in the middle of his chest. The coat of bronze mail that had hitherto protected his body was now broken, and rang harshly as the spear tore through it. He fell with a thud, and the spear stuck in his heart, which still beat, and made the butt-end of the spear quiver till dread Mars put an end to his life.
The Iliad, Chapter 13, lines 435–45 translations hybridized from Samuel Butler, Augustus Taber Murray
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Equivalent in some respects but not all: the main difference is that the resetting curves of a driven oscillator may have an abrupt jump at the moment when the driving periodicity hits it. This could be modeled as a discontinuity, deflating all topological arguments. In fact nothing discontinuous happens in real physiology, and the size of the abrupt place can only be discovered in the lab, where also one finds out whether or not idealized conceptual arguments pointed the way to discovery or to confusion.
Classical notions of spatially random parametric inhomogeneity as the basis of fibrillation might be mirrored more accurately in the processes of electrical defibrillation. At this writing, real hearts and uniform tissue models do not respond to electric shock in quantitatively comparable ways. But if inhomogeneities of resistivity are strewn throughout the modeled tissue, it becomes more responsive, and simulated fibrillation can be erased with shocks of reasonable energy. For a review see papers in the March 1998 issue of Chaos.
Unless quite close to a boundary, a localized stimulus in a continuous medium can produce only adjacent mirror-image rotors, as stressed in Winfree (1974f, 1978a, and 1983b about myocardium): this fact rather than the symmetry of large-electrode initial conditions is probably the origin of the pattern that eventually acquired the memorable name “figure of eight.”
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© 2001 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Winfree, A.T. (2001). Electrical Singular Filaments in the Heart Wall. In: The Geometry of Biological Time. Interdisciplinary Applied Mathematics, vol 12. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3484-3_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3484-3_17
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