Comparison of potential- and activation-based formulations for the inverse problem of electrocardiology

Two predominant source formulations for the inverse problem of electrocardiology currently exist. They involve the reconstruction of epicardial potentials or myocardial activation times from noninvasively recorded torso surface potentials. Each of these formulations have their advantages, however, they have not been systematically compared against each other. We present results from a simulation study which compared a number of epicardial potential (Tikhonov, Truncated singular value decomposition (TSVD), Greensite-Tikhonov and Greensite-TSVD), and a myocardial activation time formulation for the inverse problem of electrocardiology. A number of different methods were also used to determine the appropriate level of regularization (optimal, L-curve, zero-crossing, and composite residual and smoothing operator) to apply to each formulation. The simulation study was conducted using an anatomically based boundary element porcine model with a variety of cardiac sources. Varying levels of geometric error were introduced to the system and solutions were computed using each of the inverse algorithms. Results show that under pure Gaussian noise potential-based methods performed best at low noise levels while the activation-based method was less effected by higher noise levels. In the presence of correlated geometric error, the activation-based method out performed the potential methods, with the Greensite-Tikhonov method being the most favored potential-based method when using the L-curve or zero-crossing method to determine the regularization parameter.