The first notes I have for the day are from a talk by Alexy Zaitsev titled “Many Faces of Ventricular Fibrillation in the Ischemic Heart,” a title which he gradually worked up to from something much simpler, given what a complex issue it is.

I was very excited when he came to speak at Tulane last year, given that he does experimental work on ischemia, which I study via simulation. One interesting thing that he talked about was that he induced ischemia after ventricular fibrillation, and watched how it affected the fibrillation. He showed that [K⁺]_O elevation results in organization of VF.

After Dr.Zaitsev, Alan Karma spoke about Nonlinear Dynamics of Reentry and Fibrillation. He covered mechanisms setting up a heterogeneous substrate.

That was the day that I put my poster up and subsequently defended it against quite the barrage of questions. It helped me to realize that I really needed to get on top of the material better.

Was it only four days? I thought it was longer. Anyway, that’s the last of the notes that I have. Oh right, I think we skipped a bit :). Also, for some things like molecular biology, I didn’t really take notes, as I was totally lost. I’m going to try to amend that by taking some molecular biology classes next academic year.