Going around phase defects: Addressing a fundamental flaw of phase singularity detection

Phase mapping is a widespread method for identifying rotational electrical activity sustaining cardiac arrhythmias. However, conventional implementations assume that the cardiac phase map is continuous, leading to ill-defined phase indices in regions affected by functional conduction block, fibrosis, or anatomical boundaries. These regions of discontinuous or undefined phase, termed phase defects, lead to both false positive and false negative detections of rotational drivers. This work introduces an improved phase mapping implementation termed extended phase mapping that explicitly detects and accounts for phase defects, enabling robust calculation of the phase index around them. Extended phase mapping is applied to (1) simulated excitation patterns using the Fenton-Karma model, (2) experimental optical mapping data of rat ventricular fibrillation, and (3) a clinical CARTO activation map of atrial tachycardia. Across all datasets, the extended approach eliminates erroneous detections and resolves previously missed rotations. Our results demonstrate that proper treatment of phase defects yields a unified and physiologically consistent characterization of all rotational drivers including near-complete and anatomical reentries. Therefore, we propose that explicitly accounting for phase defects, rather than tracking singular points alone, gives a more complete and consistent characterization of rotational dynamics in cardiac tissue.