On vortices heating biological excitable media

An extension of the Hodgkin–Huxley mathematical model for the propagation of nerve signal which takes into account dynamical heat transfer in biological tissue is derived and fine tuned with existing experimental data. The medium is heated by Joule’s effect associated with action potential propagation, leading to characteristic thermal patterns in association with spiral and scroll waves. The introduction of heat transfer—necessary on physical grounds—provides a novel way to directly observe the movement, regular or chaotic, of the tip of spiral waves in numerical simulations and possibly in experiments regarding different biological excitable media.