Chirality as a destabilizer of electrical waves in cardiac tissue

The electrical processes that cause an arrhythmic contraction of cardiac muscle are not well understood . In thick ventricular tissue, three-dimensional effects allow for more complex structures called scroll waves, which extend the number of possible ways to initiate an arrhythmia. In the absence of spatial electrical measurements of intramural tissue, we turn to numerical simulations which let us capture the full dynamical evolution of the waves by the equations of the Fenton-Karma model. We have observed that the chirality of the scroll waves changes the threshold for wave breakup and can lead to the system into fibrillation. We have characterized the contribution of chirality to the stability of the systems with various tissue thickness, excitability and fiber rotation rates.