Contact Forces Required to Record Monophasic Action Potentials: A Complement to Catheter Contact Force Measurement

The ability to monitor catheter contact force (CF) plays a major role in assessing radiofrequency ablation, impacting lesion size and arrhythmia recurrence, and dictating ablation duration and/or overall patient safety. Our study sought to determine the relative CFs required to elicit reproducible monophasic action potential (MAP) recordings.

The study utilized four swine in which: first, median sternotomies were performed and MAPs were collected from seven ventricular locations on the epicardial surface of each heart; and second, a subset of endocardial signals was recorded from a reanimated heart. In these studies, the initial elicitation and then loss of stable MAP waveforms were recorded, as were their associated catheter CFs (n = 371).

Mean CF at the onset of stable MAP recordings was 14.2 ± 2.9 g for epicardial and 16.6 ± 2.5 g for endocardial locations. Across epicardial locations, no significant differences in CF were required to elicit MAPs. Additionally, endocardial and epicardial CFs for MAPs did not significantly differ for respective locations, i.e., right ventricular septum endocardial versus epicardial. In our study, the catheter CFs required to elicit MAPs were within optimal ranges previously reported for eliciting clinically viable radiofrequency ablations.

We believe that MAP recordings could complement CF measurements with electrical data, providing additional clinical feedback for physicians performing cardiac ablation.

If applied clinically, MAP recordings could potentially improve ablation outcomes in patients with cardiac arrhythmias.