Engineered Cardiac Tissue Patch: Coupling & Conduction

Culture & Pacing

Scaffold maturation Day 7

Pacing rate 72 bpm

With scar mode on, click/tap cells on the tissue patch to mark non-conductive fibrotic scar (grey) and watch the excitation wave route around it.

Live Readout

Conduction velocity

— mm/s

Peak synchrony

Active cardiomyocytes now

How it works

Cardiomyocytes seeded on the scaffold electrically couple to their neighbours through gap junctions as the construct matures in culture. Each cell's transmembrane voltage u and a recovery variable v evolve by the Aliev–Panfilov model, the standard minimal excitation model used to reproduce cardiac action-potential shape and wavefront propagation:

du/dt = D·∇²u − k·u·(u−a)·(u−1) − u·v
dv/dt = [ε₀ + μ₁v/(u+μ₂)]·(−v − k·u·(u−a−1))

D is the effective gap-junction diffusion coefficient — it stands in for how well-coupled the sheet is. Early cultures (low maturation day) have sparse, immature junctions and D is small, so the paced wave crawls and can fragment; by ~day 21, dense junctional coupling raises D and the wavefront sweeps through as one smooth front, matching the maturation trend reported for engineered cardiac patches (conduction velocity climbing from a few cm/s toward tens of cm/s over 1–3 weeks of culture).

Scaffold maturation — sets the diffusion coefficient D (gap-junction coupling strength).
Pacing rate — how often the left-edge "pacemaker" column fires a stimulus, like an external pacing electrode.
Conduction velocity — measured by timing the wavefront (u > 0.5) crossing two probe columns and converting cell spacing (~20µm/cell) to mm/s.
Paint Scar Zone — marks cells as non-conductive, modelling fibrotic or necrotic regions that force the wave to detour, exactly as scar tissue does in a real heart or a poorly vascularised engineered construct.

Resting cardiomyocyte Depolarized (active) Scar / non-conductive

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