Cardiac anisotropy: Is it negligible regarding noninvasive activation time imaging?

Robert Modre, Michael Seger, Gerald Fischer, Cristoph Hintermüller, Dieter Hayn, Bernhard Pfeifer, Friedrich Hanser, Günter Schreier, Bernhard Tilg

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    The aim of this study was to quantify the effect of cardiac anisotropy in the activation-based inverse problem of electrocardiography. Differences of the patterns of simulated body surface potential maps for isotropic and anisotropic conditions were investigated with regard to activation time (AT) imaging of ventricular depolarization. AT maps were estimated by solving the nonlinear inverse ill-posed problem employing spatio-temporal regularization. Four different reference AT maps (sinus rhythm, right-ventricular and septal pacing, accessory pathway) were calculated with a bidomain theory based anisotropic finite-element heart model in combination with a cellular automaton. In this heart model a realistic fiber architecture and conduction system was implemented. Although the anisotropy has some effects on forward solutions, effects on inverse solutions are small indicating that cardiac anisotropy might be negligible for some clinical applications (e.g., imaging of focal events) of our AT imaging approach. The main characteristic events of the AT maps were estimated despite neglected electrical anisotropy in the inverse formulation. The worst correlation coefficient of the estimated AT maps was 0.810 in case of sinus rhythm. However, all characteristic events of the activation pattern were found. The results of this study confirm our clinical validation studies of noninvasive AT imaging in which cardiac anisotropy was neglected.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)569-580
    Number of pages12
    JournalIEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2006

    Research Field

    • Exploration of Digital Health

    Keywords

    • Activation time imaging
    • bidomain theory
    • elec-trical anisotropy,
    • forward problem of electrocardiography
    • inverse problem of electrocardiography
    • spatiotemporal regularization

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