Sudden cardiac death, primarily caused by ventricular arrhythmias, is a major public health problem - it is one of the leading causes of mortality in the United States, resulting in more than 350,000 annual deaths. Our efforts in the Cardiac Electrophysiology Laboratory are focused on improving our understanding of and therapies for cardiac arrhythmias. Because of the complexity of electrophysiological wave propagation, we use an interdisciplinary approach that interweaves concepts that bridge the gap between theoretical physics and physiology to investigate cardiac behavior from the perspective of dynamical systems. Specifically, we utilize a comprehensive array of computational, experimental, and clinical approaches* to study:

• Dynamics of arrhythmias
• Arrhythmia prediction
• Nonlinear-dynamical arrhythmia termination (i.e. Chaos control)
• Arrhythmia prevention using a mechanistic understanding
• Development of experiment-interface software

Principal Investigator: Robert Gilmour Jr., PhD

* via our clinical collaborators