Did you know that doing 'the wave' could help Georgia Tech conduct heart research?

Two School of Physics professors, Flavio Fenton and Edwin Greco, will gather volunteers on the Tech Green, Tuesday, March 24, at 11:00am for a second attempt at breaking a world record for the largest spiral wave. The event is part of the Atlanta Science Festival.

“A spiral wave is spiral that moves in time,” said Fenton, associate professor in the School of Physics. “They appear in nature in many systems: biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics.”

We can see spiral waves in the heart, he said. There is an electrical wave that goes through the heart and makes it contract.

“When one of these electrical waves is disrupted, it can produce a spiral wave,” he said. “Spiral waves rotate at a frequency that is faster than the normal pacemaker. So what happens is the heart will contract at a much faster rate compared to the normal rhythm, driving the heart into tachycardia, which is an anomaly and can be dangerous.”

The spiral wave demonstration will involve Georgia Tech volunteers, each representing a cardiac cell. The demonstration will initiate a spiral wave as a way to characterize the heart.

“The nice thing about this demonstration is that we can then analyze it and do a comparison with what we see in the heart,” Fenton said.

Fenton and Greco have done the spiral wave in classes, and last year they did it with 600 students. This time they want to set a world record, with at least 1,000 participants.