Physiology driven adaptivity for the numerical solution of the bidomain equations

Previous work [Whiteley, J. P. IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng. 53:2139-2147, 2006] derived a stable, semi-implicit numerical scheme for solving the bidomain equations. This scheme allows the timestep used when solving the bidomain equations numerically to be chosen by accuracy considerations rather than stability considerations. In this study we modify this scheme to allow an adaptive numerical solution in both time and space. The spatial mesh size is determined by the gradient of the transmembrane and extracellular potentials while the timestep is determined by the values of: (i) the fast sodium current; and (ii) the calcium release from junctional sarcoplasmic reticulum to myoplasm current. For two-dimensional simulations presented here, combining the numerical algorithm in the paper cited above with the adaptive algorithm presented here leads to an increase in computational efficiency by a factor of around 250 over previous work, together with significantly less computational memory being required. The speedup for three-dimensional simulations is likely to be more impressive.