Analysis of electrode configurations for measuring cardiac tissue conductivities and fibre rotation

: This paper describes a multi-electrode grid, which could be used to determine cardiac tissue parameters by direct measurement. A two pass process is used, where potential measurements are made, during the plateau phase of the action potential, on a subset of these electrodes and these measurements are used to determine the bidomain conductivities. In the first pass, the potential measurements are made on a set of 'closely-spaced' electrodes and the parameters are fitted to the potential measurements in an iterative process using a bidomain model and a solver based on a modified Shor's r-algorithm. This first pass yields the extracellular conductivities. The second pass is similar except that a 'widely-spaced' electrode set is used and this time the intracellular conductivities are recovered. In addition, it is possible to determine the fibre rotation throughout the tissue, since the bidomain model used here is able to include the effects of fibre rotation. In the simulation studies presented here, the model is solved with known conductivities, on each of the two subsets of electrodes, to generate two sets of 'measured potentials.' Conductivities are then recovered by solving an inverse problem based on the measured potentials, to which various levels of noise are added. For example, simulations in the first pass are performed using an electrode spacing of 500 mum, for a situation where the longitudinal and transverse space constants are 769 and 308 mum, respectively. These give very accurate average percentage relative errors for the longitudinal and transverse extracellular conductivities, over five simulations with 1% noise added, of 0.3 and 0.2%. Twenty-five second pass simulations, on a 1 mm grid, yield average percentage relative errors of 3.8, 2.6 and 1.4% for the corresponding intracellular values and the fibre rotation angle, respectively.