Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 January 2013
The propagation of the action potential in the heart chambers is accurately described bythe Bidomain model, which is commonly accepted and used in the specialistic literature.However, its mathematical structure of a degenerate parabolic system entails highcomputational costs in the numerical solution of the associated linear system. Domaindecomposition methods are a natural way to reduce computational costs, and OptimizedSchwarz Methods have proven in the recent years their effectiveness in accelerating theconvergence of such algorithms. The latter are based on interface matching conditions moreefficient than the classical Dirichlet or Neumann ones. In this paper we analyze anOptimized Schwarz approach for the numerical solution of the Bidomain problem. We assessthe convergence of the iterative method by means of Fourier analysis, and we investigatethe parameter optimization in the interface conditions. Numerical results in 2D and 3D aregiven to show the effectiveness of the method.