Spatially Coherent Activation Maps for Electrocardiographic Imaging

Josselin Duchateau (1, 2, 3) , Mark Potse (4, 1, 5) , Remi Dubois (6, 1, 2, 3)

1 IHU-LIRYC
2 CRCTB - Centre de recherche Cardio-Thoracique de Bordeaux [Bordeaux]
3 INSERM - Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale
4 Center for Computational Medicine in Cardiology [Lugano]
5 CARMEN - Modélisation et calculs pour l'électrophysiologie cardiaque
6 ESPCI Paris - Ecole Superieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris

Objective: Cardiac mapping is an important diagnostic step in cardiac electrophysiology. One of its purposes is to generate a map of the depolarization sequence. This map is constructed in clinical routine either by directly analyzing cardiac electrograms (EGM) recorded invasively or an estimate of these EGMs obtained by a non-invasive technique. Activation maps based on noninvasively estimated EGMs often show artefactual jumps in activation times. To overcome this problem we present a new method to construct the activation maps from reconstructed unipolar EGMs. Methods: On top of the standard estimation of local activation time from unipolar intrinsic deflections, we propose to mutually compare the EGMs in order to estimate the delays in activation for neighboring recording locations. We then describe a workflow to construct a spatially coherent activation map from local activation times and delay estimates in order to create more accurate maps. The method is optimized using simulated data and evaluated on clinical data from 12 different activation sequences. Results: We found that the standard methodology created lines of artificially strong activation time gradient. The proposed workflow enhanced these maps significantly. Conclusion: Estimating delays between neighbors is an interesting option for activation map computation in ECGi.

Mots clés: Electrocardiography; Electrophysiology; Inverse problems

Domaines: Cardiologie et système cardiovasculaire

Josselin Duchateau, Mark Potse, Remi Dubois. Spatially Coherent Activation Maps for Electrocardiographic Imaging. IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 2017, 64, pp.1149-1156. ⟨10.1109/TBME.2016.2593003⟩. ⟨hal-01386890⟩