  This work deals with the numerical solution of the monodomain and bidomain
models of electrical activity of myocardial tissue. The bidomain model is a
system consisting of a possibly degenerate parabolic PDE coupled with an
elliptic PDE for the transmembrane and extracellular potentials, respectively.
This system of two scalar PDEs is supplemented by a time-dependent ODE modeling
the evolution of the so-called gating variable. In the simpler sub-case of the
monodomain model, the elliptic PDE reduces to an algebraic equation. Two simple
models for the membrane and ionic currents are considered, the
Mitchell-Schaeffer model and the simpler FitzHugh-Nagumo model. Since typical
solutions of the bidomain and monodomain models exhibit wavefronts with steep
gradients, we propose a finite volume scheme enriched by a fully adaptive
multiresolution method, whose basic purpose is to concentrate computational
effort on zones of strong variation of the solution. Time adaptivity is
achieved by two alternative devices, namely locally varying time stepping and a
Runge-Kutta-Fehlberg-type adaptive time integration. A series of numerical
examples demonstrates thatthese methods are efficient and sufficiently accurate
to simulate the electrical activity in myocardial tissue with affordable
effort. In addition, an optimalthreshold for discarding non-significant
information in the multiresolution representation of the solution is derived,
and the numerical efficiency and accuracy of the method is measured in terms of
CPU time speed-up, memory compression, and errors in different norms.
