Investigating Cardiac Optical Signal Dynamics in Guinea Pigs Using Directed Information

Investigating the bio-electrical propagation could potentially facilitate understanding of the underlying physiological mechanisms of the bio-electrical activities, and thus enhancing disease diagnosis. High-spatial-resolution optical mapping technique has been used to examine the cardiac electrical propagation. However, it is expensive, requires more computational resource, and has limitations in clinical settings. This study offers a unique contribution to the development and optimization of the directed information (DI)-based method to estimate the cardiac excitation propagation. This method was applied to the cardiac optical excitation signals acquired from adult guinea pig's heart. The results of our method using cardiac action potentials of low-spatial resolution were compared to the excitation propagation observed in the cardiac optical mapping images of high-spatial-resolution. The results showed the remarkable ability of our method to provide intricate and complex details using low-spatial-resolution data, which are difficult to visualize from the cardiac optical recordings, offering a more realistic representation of the clinical scenarios.