Automatic location of phase singularities in cardiac spiralwave reentry simulation

Cardiac arrhythmias can be sustained by a number of reentry waves, which continuously propagates into recovered tissue and rotates around a central core. In experiments, the reentry waves are usually recorded in two dimensions and the phase singularity (PS) is used to quantitatively study the complex spatiotemporal patterns of fibrillation. In this paper, we propose an automatic method to identify the PS in two dimensions. With the cardiac reentry simulations, the efficiency, accuracy and parameter sensitivity of the proposed method were studied and compared with two commonly used methods. The results showed that the proposed method is more time-saving and less parameter sensitive than the previous methods. Furthermore, the detecting progress of the proposed method is automatic and can accurately detect the PSs without changing any parameters for different heart cell models, which is especially important for 3D whole heart simulation, since a lot of different cell types exist in the heart.