VizCOM: A Novel Tool for Advanced Visualization and Analysis of Cardiac Optical Mapping Data

Area of Science:

• Cardiovascular Physiology
• Biomedical Imaging
• Computational Biology

Background:

• Cardiac optical mapping is crucial for studying cardiac spatiotemporal dynamics.
• High-resolution CMOS cameras provide quality data but generate large datasets, creating an analysis bottleneck.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an interactive, feature-rich tool for visualizing and analyzing cardiac optical mapping data.
• To address the data analysis bottleneck in cardiac optical mapping.

Main Methods:

• Developed VizCOM, a Python-based software for Windows and MacOS.
• VizCOM processes long voltage or voltage-calcium recordings from various cameras.
• Features include region of interest masking, pixel signal display, filtering (stacking, baseline drift removal), and activation map generation.

Main Results:

• VizCOM enables visualization of action potential duration (APD) vs. diastolic interval, APD dispersion, and ΔAPD for alternans analysis.
• The tool supports APD calculation along drawn lines for alternans analysis.
• Histograms of APD spatial distributions, APD restitutions, and activation sequence movies can be generated and saved.

Conclusions:

• VizCOM provides comprehensive, high-level support for cardiac optical mapping signal visualization and analysis.
• The tool effectively handles large datasets and complex analyses, facilitating research in cardiac electrophysiology.