A method for the treatment of anisotropic skeletal muscle layer in the electrocardiographic calculation

This paper presents an effective method for the treatment of anisotropic skeletal muscle layer in the forward calculation of ECG by FEM. The method can be used in principle to find the potential distribution of the torso surface and the current density of the epicardial surface at the same time on a theoretical electrocardiographic model. In this paper we examined theoretically the transformation relationship between the anisotropy in a local coordinate system and that in the global coordinate system, considering that the anisotropic conductivity of the skeletal muscle layer is orthogonal in the local coordinate system, but the components of the conductivity tensor may not be directed along the axes of the global coordinate system. In order to show the calculation accuracy of the method, we introduced an example that has an analytical solution. We found that the analytic solution and the numerical one are very close and agreeable.