Analysis of Microstructure of the Cardiac Conduction System Based on Three-Dimensional Confocal Microscopy
The specialised conducting tissues present in the ventricles are responsible for the fast distribution of the electrical impulse from the atrio-ventricular node to regions in the subendocardial myocardium. Characterisation of anatomical features of the specialised conducting tissues in the ventricles is highly challenging, in particular its most distal section, which is connected to the working myocardium via Purkinje-myocardial junctions. The goal of this work is to characterise the architecture of the distal section of the Purkinje network by differentiating Purkinje cells from surrounding tissue, performing a segmentation of Purkinje fibres at cellular scale, and mathematically describin…
Towards High Resolution Computational Models of the Cardiac Conduction System: A Pipeline for Characterization of Purkinje-Ventricular-Junctions
The cardiac conduction system (CCS) has been in the spot light of the clinical and modeling community in recent years because of its fundament role in physiology and pathophysiology of the heart. Experimental research has focused mainly on investigating the electrical properties of the Purkinje-ventricular-junctions (PVJs). The structure of the PVJs has only been described through schematic drawings but not thoroughly studied. In this work confocal microscopy was used with the aim of three-dimensional characterization of PVJs. Adult rabbit hearts were labeled with fluorescent dyes, imaged with confocal microscopy and Purkinje fibers differentiated from other cardiac tissue by their lack of …