Stiffness analysis of cardiac cell models: implications on real-time heart simulation

The electrophysiology in a cardiac cell can be modelled as a system of ordinary differential equations. The efficient solution of these systems is important because they must be solved billions of times as sub-problems of organ-level simulations. The wide variety of existing cardiac cell models encompasses many different properties, including the complexity of the model and the degree of stiffness. In this talk, I discuss the stiffness properties of a range of cardiac cell models and discuss the implications for their numerical solution. This analysis allows us to select or design numerical methods that are highly effective and hence move us a step closer to real-time heart simulation.