A heterogeneous coupled oscillator model for simulation of ECG signals

We present a novel model of cardiac conduction system including main pacemakers and heart muscles. Sinoatrial node, atrioventricular node and His–Purkinje system are represented by modified van der Pol-type oscillators connected with time-delay velocity coupling. For description of atrial and ventricular muscles, where depolarization and repolarization processes are considered as separate waves, we use modified FitzHugh–Nagumo model. In this work, we obtained synthetic ECG as a combined signal of atrial and ventricular muscles and reproduced several normal and pathological rhythms. Inclusion of cardiac muscle response allows to investigate interactions between pacemakers and resulting global heartbeat dynamics by means of clinically comparable realistic ECG signals. This feature distinguishes our model from existing cardiac oscillator models. To solve the system of differential equations describing the proposed heterogeneous coupled oscillator model we developed a software in MATLAB environment utilizing special DDE23 function.