Engineered Cardiac Tissue Patch: Coupling & Conduction

This simulation narrows advanced tissue engineering down to one concrete, well-defined problem: getting a lab-grown cardiac patch to beat as one coordinated sheet instead of a scatter of twitching cells. Cardiomyocytes are seeded across a biocompatible scaffold, and as the culture matures they knit together electrically through gap junctions. A paced stimulus at one edge triggers an excitation wave — governed by the Aliev–Panfilov cardiac excitation model — that sweeps across the tissue sheet, visibly faster and smoother the more mature (better-coupled) the construct is. Tune the maturation day to see gap-junction coupling strengthen conduction, change the pacing rate, and paint scar/fibrotic zones directly onto the patch to watch the wavefront route around non-conductive regions, while live readouts track conduction velocity, beat-to-beat synchrony and the instantaneous fraction of active cells.