• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.403-409
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• 2000

This paper is about to simulate the defibrillation situations using 3D FE(finite element) thorax model and describes the effects of three clinical electrodes' positions and size and organ's resistivity used in simulation on the characteristics of current density distribution over myocardium. The model was constructed with a eillipsoidal cylinder for the thorax and the 2D Visible Human images for remains. And, the distributions of current density were computed by a commercial program ANSYS 5.4. The electrical shock of the AP(anterior-posterior ) electrode provided more current flows with heart than the others and that of the LL(lateral-lateral) electrode showed the most uniform current density distribution. However, the electrode size had little effect on the current density distribution. In the evaluation of model's sensitivity to tissue resistivity variation, the variation of the myocardium's resistivity most affected the minimum, average and maximum current densities.