Conversion from electrocardiosignals to equivalent electrical sources on heart surface.

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Computational Biology
• Cardiology

Background:

• Electrocardiography (ECG) aims to improve cardiac diagnosis reliability.
• Solving the inverse problem of electrocardiography is crucial for detailed heart electrical activity analysis.
• Existing methods involve processing multichannel ECG signals with known electrode coordinates.

Purpose of the Study:

• To reconstruct the distribution of equivalent electrical sources on the heart surface for detailed electrical activity information.
• To analyze electrocardiographic maps (ECG) and heart surface source maps (HSSM) during the cardiac cycle.
• To compare these maps visually and quantitatively in the presence of cardiac pathologies.

Main Methods:

• Reconstruction of equivalent electrical sources on the heart surface at low hardware cost.
• Utilized a cellular automata model for heart electrical activity.
• Studied torso surface potential maps (TSPM) and heart surface source maps (HSSM) across the cardiac cycle.

Main Results:

• Successfully reconstructed heart surface electrical sources during the cardiac cycle.
• Visual and quantitative comparisons of TSPM and HSSM were performed for various pathological regions.
• Cellular automata model effectively simulated heart excitation with pathological areas.

Conclusions:

• Cellular automata models can simulate heart excitation, including pathological conditions of varying size and location.
• Changes in epicardial electrical source distribution are significantly more detectable than torso surface ECG map alterations in pathological conditions.
• This highlights the potential of epicardial mapping for improved diagnosis of cardiac conduction disturbances.