Evaluation of magnetocardiography indices in patients with cardiac diseases

The purpose of this work was to reveal pathological electrophysiological changes in patients with different cardiological diseases by means of magnetocardiographic (MCG) mapping. MCG mapping was performed with a 7-channel magnetocardiograph without a magnetically shielded room. We divided the 159 subjects studied into seven groups: 44 healthy controls, 42 patients with coronary artery disease (CAD), 11 patients affected with myocardiac infarction (MI), 11 with hypertension (HT), 14 with silent ischemia (SI), 13 with heart failure (HF), 14 with fibrillation (FB), and 10 patients after stunning of coronary arteries (ST). All patients were examined using a standard 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG), biochemical analyses, and loading tests (bicycle-ergometry); some were also studied by holter monitoring, echocardiography, electrophysiological test, and coronary angiography. Morphological and correlation analyses of MCG maps were performed. Moreover, a number of quantitative MCG indices, which reflect the distribution of the excitation in the heart, were proposed. We observed that some indices demonstrated efficiency in recognition of pathologic activity for 5 diseases: CAD, MI, HT, HF, SI and FB.