Mathematical Approach for Modeling the Uterine Electrical Activity

The aim of physiological modeling of the uterine electrical activity generated at cellular level is to understand the main physiological uterine contractile mechanisms, in particular, the propagation mechanisms and their relationship with the uterine EMG signal recorded externally from the abdominal wall of the pregnant women. In this present paper, we model the electrical activity simulated at its cellular level. This model is built in three steps: first we built a model based on the formulation of Hodgkin and Huxley and adapted to the specificities of the uterine cell. The second step was the integration of the cellular model in a two-dimensional propagation model by using the reactiondiffusion equations in order to simulate the propagation of the uterine activity at the tissue level. Finally, a simplified version of the space-time integration of the electrical activity was used to build a first example of the uterine EMG.