Optimized Schwarz Methods for the Bidomain system in electrocardiology

¹ BCAM, Basque Center for Applied Mathematics, Bilbao, Spain.
lgerardo@bcamath.org
² Dept. of Scientific Computing, The Florida State University, Thallahassee, FL, USA.
mperego@fsu.edu

Received: 29 November 2011
Revised: 16 July 2012

Abstract

The propagation of the action potential in the heart chambers is accurately described by the Bidomain model, which is commonly accepted and used in the specialistic literature. However, its mathematical structure of a degenerate parabolic system entails high computational costs in the numerical solution of the associated linear system. Domain decomposition methods are a natural way to reduce computational costs, and Optimized Schwarz Methods have proven in the recent years their effectiveness in accelerating the convergence of such algorithms. The latter are based on interface matching conditions more efficient than the classical Dirichlet or Neumann ones. In this paper we analyze an Optimized Schwarz approach for the numerical solution of the Bidomain problem. We assess the convergence of the iterative method by means of Fourier analysis, and we investigate the parameter optimization in the interface conditions. Numerical results in 2D and 3D are given to show the effectiveness of the method.