Interplay of spatial aggregation and computational geometry in extracting diagnostic features from cardiac activation data

Functional imaging plays an important role in the assessment of organ functions, as it provides methods to represent the spatial behavior of diagnostically relevant variables within reference anatomical frameworks. The salient physical events that underly a functional image can be unveiled by appropriate feature extraction methods capable to exploit domain-specific knowledge and spatial relations at multiple abstraction levels and scales. In this work we focus on general feature extraction methods that can be applied to cardiac activation maps, a class of functional images that embed spatio-temporal information about the wavefront propagation. The described approach integrates a qualitative spatial reasoning methodology with techniques borrowed from computational geometry to provide a computational framework for the automated extraction of basic features of the activation wavefront kinematics and specific sets of diagnostic features that identify an important class of rhythm pathologies.