Speaker
Description
Pulsed field ablation (PFA) is a novel cardiac ablation technology based on irreversible electroporation that has revolutionized the arrhythmia treatment. Despite its wide use, computational models are still unable to accurately capture the experimentally observed range of width-to-depth anisotropy ratio of the resulting lesions. This work enhances the porcine open-chest computational model we introduced in \cite{Petras2025} by incorporating ventricular cardiac fibre orientations, as well as two competing terms that alter the tissue electrical conductivity in an anisotropic manner: an electroporation term that depends on the cardiomyocyte orientation, and a gap junction closure term that acts in the fibre direction. Lesion size was estimated using a lethal electric field threshold (LTE), and the resulting simulated lesions were compared with experimental measurements reported in \cite{Petras2025}. The presence of the two competing mechanisms allows for a more accurate matching of the simulated lesion shape with the experimentally observed ones. A sensitivity analysis for the model parameters highlights the gap junction closure term as the second most important parameter (after the electric field lethal threshold) affecting the lesion shape. The proposed model enables then accurate simulations and lesion predictions that align with the experimentally observed results.
Bibliography
\bibitem{Petras2025} A.~Petras, G.~Amoros Figueras, Z.~Moreno Weidmann, T.~Garcia-Sanchez, D.~Vilades Medel, A.~Ivorra, J.M.~Guerra and L.~Gerardo-Giorda. Is a single lethal electric field threshold sufficient to characterize the lesion size in computational modeling of cardiac pulsed field ablation? Heart Rhythm O2, vol. 6, no. 5, pp. 671–677, 2025 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hroo.2025.02.014)
