Report of the first virtual visualization of the reconstructed electrocardiographic display symposium

In August 2004, a group of scientists and clinicians with a deep interest in electrocardiography met to discuss the present and future of the electrocardiogram as an imaging modality. Motivated by a set of challenges to the field, they each presented and discussed their ideas about the basic electrophysiology, the computational approaches required, and the clinical state of the art and where it might go in the future. In this paper, we present a summary of these presentations and discussions, starting with a statement of the challenges and a motivating case study that illustrates the inadequacies of electrocardiography as it is current practiced. Following this introduction are overviews of the present state of the inverse problem of electrocardiography and the underlying assumptions of this form of simulation and modeling. We conclude with a summary of the needs that we feel must be addressed to achieve the full potential of electrically based imaging of the heart.