New approach to the defibrillation problem: Suppression of the spiral wave activity of cardiac tissue

A model of an excitable medium is considered for describing the development of fibrillation (i.e., spatiotemporal chaos) in cardiac tissue through the generation of a set of coexisting spiral waves. It is shown that a weak external point action on such a medium leads to the suppression of all spiral waves and, correspondingly, to the stabilization of the system dynamics. After reaching the regular regime, only the external source exists in the medium. The frequencies and amplitudes at which such stabilization occurs are determined. The case of the action of several point sources is considered. Analysis is performed using the Bray method to identify the number of spiral waves.