Numerical simulation of mechanoelectric feedback in a deformed myocardium

Mechanoelectric feedback is the effect of deformation on the contractile apparatus of the muscle cell, the change in myocardial conductivity, the appearance of additional transmembrane currents (stretch-activated channels). The first type of feedback is closely related to the electromechanical coupling process and is taken into account in the corresponding models. The derivation of the strain-to-conductance ratios was carried out based on the analysis of the microstructural model using the homogenization method. Cardiac tissue was considered as a periodic lattice, where cells are rectangular prisms filled with an isotropic electrolyte, and the conductivity of the gap junctions was taken into account through the boundary conditions on the sides of these prisms and was considered constant. It is shown that the tensor, the inverse of the myocardial conductivity tensor, can be represented as the sum of the inverse reduced conductivity tensors of myoplasma and gap junctions...