Cardiac Chaos

HON 462
R. A. DiDio
La Salle University

The Cardiac Chaos show will be run by Amy Baran & Josh Fantini . Click here to view the PowerPoint presentation.

Date: Wednesday, March 12, 2003

Readings

1. Inner Rhythms, (the next-to-last chapter in Gleick)
2. The Chaotic Rhythms of Life, Robert May, (Ch. 7 in the Exploring Chaos text)
3. Sudden Death is Not Chaos, Barry Goldberger, David Rigney , (from The Ubiquity of Chaos, AAAS 1989)
4. Dynamics of Cardiac Arrhythmias, Leon Glass, Physics Today, August, 1996
5. Controlling Cardiac Chaos, Alan Garfinkel, Mark Spano, William Ditto, James Weiss, Science vol 257, August 28, 1992
6. The role of nonlinear dynamics in cardiac arrhythmia control
   D. Christini et al., Heart Disease, 1 pp. 190-200 (1999).
   

Other Background Reading/Sites

• Read more about D.Christini's work at the Cornell Cardiac Electrodynamics Laboratory. There you'll find many reports on computational, experimental and clinical aspects of nonlinear dynamics and cardiac studies.
• Before Chaos was a household word, Arthur Winfree wrote a very accessible Scientific American Article that foresaw the issues of non-linear cardiac dynamics in Sudden Cardiac Death: A Problem in Topology (Scientific American, 1983). This is the work described in the Inner Rhythms chapter in Gleick.
• Mastering Chaos, Ditto and Pecora, Scientific American, August 1993 (W. Ditto is one of the authors in the Controlling Cardiac Chaos article listed above.)
• From Clocks to Chaos: The Rhythms of Life, by Leon Glass and Michael MAckey, Princeton Press, 1988. The complete description of spatial and temporal chaos arising from their landmark studies of the chicken heart.
• Late-breaking news (Jan. 2003) from the MAx Planck Institute concerning Chaos in the Heart and "new methods for terminating cardiac fibrillation."
• Why not branch out to Chaos in the Brain/Mind/Consciousness: check out the Walter J. Freeman Neurobiology Full Manuscript Archives where you'll find interesting articles discussing the use of Chaotic dynamics in modeling perception and the applications of Neurodynamics in the behavioral sciences.