Competing pacemakers create distinctive triplets in heartbeats

 A simple set of mathematical rules that accurately identifies signs of competing electrical signals in the heart has been developed by McGill's Leon Glass, Gil Bub and Alvin Shrier and their UBC colleagues Marc Deyel and Zachary Laksman. The Canadian team did in vitro experiments that showed how abnormal beating triggered by anomalous electrical impulses can generate distinctive triplets. These triplets also appear in cardiac data from real patients and also emerge from simple mathematical models. Physics Today 76, 3, 18 (2023); https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.5193. As well as Physics Focus https://physics.aps.org/articles/v16/2, and a PNAS blog:  https://www.pnas.org/post/journal-club/mathematical-patterns-reveal-tell-tale-beat-broken-heart