The acronym Momme stands for MOdèle et Méthodes Mathématiques en Électrocardiologie. It is a research project supported by the ANR for the period 1/2008 to 12/2011 (ref. JCJC-07-0141) within the young researcher program, and interested in studying some mathematical models used in electrocardiology and their numerical approximation.
The electrical behaviour of the heart is described by models at various scales, from the cellular or subcellular level to the level of the whole organ. These models are usually systems of differential equations, for instance to describe the electrophysiology at a cell level (Hodgkin-Huxley models), to describe an individual excitable tissue at a macroscopic level (bidomain or monodomain equations), to describe the patterns of the electrocardiogram, etc. A complete model of the heart is supposed to gather all this knowledge together with data from anatomy or histology of the heart. It is expected to be realistic enough for numerical experiments to be usefull in a biological or clinical context.
Such a model discretized by standard methods requires a lot of CPU resources to compute. The project aims at writing innovative intermediate models and new numerical methods mainly in order to speed up computations. It requires to understand better the electrophysiology of the heart and to introduce new mathematics to describe it.