Comparison of minimum-norm estimation and beamforming in electrocardiography with acute ischemia

In the electrocardiographic (ECG) inverse problem, the electrical activity of the heart is estimated from measured electrocardiogram. A model of thorax conductivities and a model of the cardiac generator is required for the ECG inverse problem. Limitations and errors in methods, models, and data will lead to errors in the estimates. However, in experimental applications, the use of limited or erroneous models is often inevitable due to necessary model simplifications and the difficulty of obtaining accurate 3D anatomical imaging data. In this work, we focus on two methods for solving the inverse problem of ECG in the case of acute ischemia: minimum-norm (MN) estimation and linearly constrained minimum-variance beamforming. We study how these methods perform with different sizes of ischemia and with erroneous conductivity models. The results indicate that the beamformer can localize small ischemia given an accurate model, but it cannot be used for estimating the size of ischemia. The MN estimator is tolerant to geometry errors and excels in estimating the size of ischemia, although the beamformer performs better with accurate model and small ischemia.