Bifurcation Analysis of Early Afterdepolarizations in a Ventricular Cell Model

Abnormal oscillations of ventricular cell action potential can lead to cardiac arrhythmias. Early afterdepolarizations (EADs) is one kind of these oscillations that have been widely studied in the field of cardiac arrhythmias diagnosis and therapies. Nowadays although ventricular cell models have been developed, yet dynamical mechanisms of EADs remain unknown that need more researches. In this paper, using phase plane analysis of a minimal model of ventricular cell, we show that EADs are occurred as a result of Hopf and homoclinic bifurcations in ventricular cell. we also show that during period pacing, chaos happens at the transition from no EAD to EADs. This result provides a distinct explanation for the EAD behavior of the cardiac cells and also explains EADs dynamics in accordance with experiment results. While this research was performed for ventricular cells, but the achieved results can be extend to other excitable systems and used in the prediction of oscillation due to the changes of system parameters.