Solving the fully coupled heart and torso problems of electrocardiology with a 3D discrete duality finite volume method

Abstract. A new 3D nite volume formulation and discretiza-tion is presented to simulate the electrocardiograms. It allows for the full coupling relations between the heart and the torso to be computed. Additionally, realistic ionic models are used, with very sti dynamics. Hence, thousands of iterations are needed, each of which requires to solve a large and sparse linear system. The sys-tem is proved to be well-posed. Numerical results are presented, that rely on the choice of a good preconditioning technique. 1