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The bidomain model, coupled with accurate models of cell membrane kinetics, is generally believed to provide a reasonable basis for numerical simulations of cardiac electrophysiology. Because of changes occurring in very short time intervals and over small spatial domains, discretized versions of these models must be solved on fine computational grids, and small time-steps must be applied. This leads to huge computational challenges that have been addressed by several authors. One popular way of reducing the CPU demands is to approximate the bidomain model by the monodomain model, and thus reducing a two by two set of partial differential equations to one scalar partial differential equation; both of which are coupled to a set of ordinary differential equations modeling the cell membrane kinetics. A reduction in CPU time of two orders of magnitude has been reported. It is the purpose of the …