Current understanding of arrhythmia mechanisms and design of anti-arrhythmic drug therapies hinges on the assumption that myocytes from the same region of a single heart have similar, if not identical, action potential waveforms and drug responses. On the contrary, recent experiments reveal significant heterogeneity in uncoupled healthy myocytes both from different hearts as well as from identical regions within a single heart. In this work, a methodology is developed for quantifying the individual electrophysiological properties of large numbers of uncoupled cardiomyocytes under ion channel block in terms of the parameters values of a conceptual fast-slow model of electrical excitability. The approach is applied to a population of nearly 500 rabbit ventricular myocytes for which action potential duration (APD) before and after the application of the drug nifedipine was experimentally measured (Lachaud et al., 2022, Cardiovasc. Res.). To this end, drug action is represented by a multiplicative factor to an effective ion conductance, a closed form asymptotic expression for APD is derived and inverted to determine model parameters as functions of APD and ∆ APD (drug-induced change in APD) for each myocyte. Two free protocol-related quantities are calibrated to experiment using an adaptive-domain procedure based on an original assumption of optimal excitability. The explicit APD expression and the resulting set of model parameter values allow (a) direct evaluation of conditions necessary to maintain fixed APD or ∆ APD, (b) predictions of the proportion of cells remaining excitable after drug application, (c) predictions of stimulus period dependency and (d) predictions of dose-response curves, the latter being in agreement with additional experimental data.

Contemporary realistic mathematical models of single-cell cardiac electrical excitation are immensely detailed. Model complexity leads to parameter uncertainty, high computational cost and barriers to mechanistic understanding. There is a need for reduced models that are conceptually and mathematically simple but physiologically accurate. To this end, we consider an archetypal model of single-cell cardiac excitation that replicates the phase-space geometry of detailed cardiac models, but at the same time has a simple piecewise-linear form and a relatively low-dimensional configuration space. In order to make this archetypal model practically applicable, we develop and report a robust method for estimation of its parameter values from the morphology of single-stimulus action potentials derived from detailed ionic current models and from experimental myocyte measurements. The procedure is applied to five significant test cases and an excellent agreement with target biomarkers is achieved. Action potential duration restitution curves are also computed and compared to those of the target test models and data, demonstrating conservation of dynamical pacing behaviour by the fine-tuned archetypal model. An archetypal model that accurately reproduces a variety of wet-lab and synthetic electrophysiology data offers a number of specific advantages such as computational efficiency, as also demonstrated in the study. Open-source numerical code of the models and methods used is provided.