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The heart is a powerful muscle that pumps blood throughout the body by means of a coordinated contraction. The contraction is generated by an electrical activation, which is spread by a wave of bioelectricity that propagates in a coordinated manner throughout the heart.
In this web site you will find information about the heart's function and structure along with information about some arrhythmias with many movies and interactive java applets.
This site is mantained and developed by
Elizabeth Cherry and Flavio Fenton
We focuse on understanding the origin and evolution of arrhythmias by combining clinical, experimental, and theoretical work, with a special emphasis in computer simulations.
Heart disease is one of the most prevalent diseases in the world and is the leading cause of death in industrialized countries. In the US alone, cardiovascular disease affects about 68 million people (roughly 25% of the total population) from both sexes and all races and ages and costs an estimated $117 billion annually [1]. Nearly 1/3 of the 2.3 million US deaths reported annually are due to heart disease, as many as from cancer, accidents, pneumonia and diabetes altogether [1]. About 30% of these deaths occur suddenly and unpredictably as a result of fast-developing electromechanical malfunctions of the heart [2]. These arrhythmias lead to an inadequate blood supply for the body by disrupting the normal cardiac cycle and compromising the heart's pumping action.
Statistics from the National Center for Health Statistics [1] and from the American Heart Association [2].
This page contains the virtual museum (version 1) in 3D. To travel in it, you need to install a VRML viewer in your browser (unless you have one already), you can use Cortona VRML client (Free and available for Windows and Mac), which is very quick and easy to install and can be also used for powerpoint presentations.
The "Cardiac Virtual Museum", includes various galleries you can tour like: the human atria and the dog ventrcles exhibits.
This page contains VRML's of various heart structures
The underlying cause of many arrhythmias is the development of a reentrant circuit of electrical activity that repetitively stimulates the heart and produces contractions at a rapid rate. During tachycardia, a single wave can rotate as a spiral wave, producing fast rates and complexity. During fibrillation, a single spiral wave can degenerate into multiple waves. Because contraction is stimulated by the pattern of electrical waves, arrhythmias can compromise the heart's ability to pump blood and sometimes may be lethal.
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