Anyone who has listened through a stethoscope to a healthy human heart has probably heard its soft, rhythmic beating. Arrhythmias are abnormal rhythms of the heart that cause it to pump less effectively.
Arrhythmias factor into half of all sudden cardiac deaths in the United States each year.
Increased demand for improved technology for arrhythmia treatment and prevention, especially electronic implantable devices that apply an electric shock to the heart, is fueling research at the Cardiac Rhythm Management Laboratory in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. This view of a rabbit heart shows the directions of fibers on the surface over which electric current flows. With the aid of laboratory testing on rabbit hearts and finite-element analysis, researchers have learned how the structure of heart fibers may affect the application and distribution of an electric current. The findings of this research will be applied to improve existing implantable devices to better regulate heart rhythms. A normal, healthy heart is about the size of an orange and pumps thousands of gallons of blood each day.