Numerical approximation of parametrized problems in cardiac electrophysiology by a local reduced basis method

The efficient solution of coupled PDEs/ODEs problems arising in cardiac electrophysiology is of key importance whenever interested to study the electrical behavior of the tissue for several instances of relevant physical and/or geometrical parameters. This poses significant challenges to reduced order modeling (ROM) techniques –such as the reduced basis method –traditionally employed when dealing with the repeated solution of parameter dependent differential equations. Indeed, the nonlinear nature of the problem, the presence of moving fronts in the solution, and the high sensitivity of this latter to parameter variations, make the application of standard ROM techniques very problematic. In this paper we propose a local ROM built through a k-means clustering in the state space of the snapshots for both the solution and the nonlinear term. Several comparisons among alternative local ROMs on a benchmark test case show the effectivity of the proposed approach. Finally, the application to a parametrized problem set on an idealized left-ventricle geometry shows the capability of the proposed ROM to face complex problems.