The main body of the work presented in this book was written in June and July 1982 (and partially rewritten in 1984) in an attempt to get the academic title "Dr.". The strain of reorganizing the diverse computergroups of the University Hospital of Utrecht in the Netherlands, "incompatibilité d'humeurs" and a prolonged illness followed by my dismissal early in 1986 made that goal inachievable. No experiments were performed by me except in one case. The "work" consisted of designing, programming and using a signal analysis program with digitized cardiac electrograms of dogs and humans as input. The programming was made possible by a grant from the Netherlands Heart Foundation. The cardioelectrograms of the dogs were made available by Dr. A.N.E. Zimmerman of the Department of Cardiology of the State University of Utrecht and those of the human patients by Dr. N. van Hemel of St. Antonius Hospital in Nieuwegein in the Netherlands. As the results from the signal analysis contradicted popular believes about ventricular fibrillation, a mathematical model of heartcell interaction was created which showed the same type of signals during "fibrillation" as a fibrillating heart. The original model needed a Cyber supercomputer, but now a PC-version is available.
In 1979, 1980, 1982, 1983, 1984 and 1988 the preliminary results were presented and discussed at congresses:
Recently (Januari 1992) I discovered that even in 1991 people still referred to these old articles, so I decided to publish upon my own account and responsibility all unpublished material, updated with relevant literature since 1988. All mistakes are mine and no blame whatsoever should fall upon any distinguished Dutch cardiologist, hospital or university.
My son discovered on internet some scientific articles dated September 1995, that still mentioned my publications. This inspired me to put my theories about ventricular fibrillation on the World Wide Web.