Ventricular Fibrillation: Spiral Wave Breakup

Ventricular fibrillation is not simply "faster" ventricular tachycardia — it is the electrical substrate turning spatially chaotic. This simulator integrates the Barkley reaction-diffusion model, a well-established two-variable excitable-medium equation, on a 2D sheet of cardiac-like tissue rendered as a live 3D activation-height map. Seed a single reentrant spiral wave, then push excitability, excitation duration and diffusive coupling toward the regime where the spiral's arm becomes unstable: the once-organized rotor tears into a shifting field of independent wavelets — the reaction-diffusion mechanism believed to underlie the transition from organized reentrant tachycardia into ventricular fibrillation. Live readouts track excited tissue fraction, wavefront count and the activation cycle length at a fixed probe point.