Neglecting cardiac electrical anisotropy in noninvasive activation time imaging had small effects on inverse solutions, yielding a worst-case correlation coefficient of 0.810 for estimated maps.
Does neglecting cardiac anisotropy affect the accuracy of noninvasive activation time imaging?
Cardiac anisotropy may be negligible for certain clinical applications of noninvasive activation time imaging, as key activation events can still be accurately estimated.
Effect estimate: Correlation coefficient 0.810
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.
Modre et al. (Wed,) conducted a other in Ventricular depolarization. Noninvasive activation time imaging neglecting cardiac anisotropy vs. Anisotropic conditions was evaluated on Correlation coefficient of estimated activation time maps (Correlation coefficient 0.810). Neglecting cardiac electrical anisotropy in noninvasive activation time imaging had small effects on inverse solutions, yielding a worst-case correlation coefficient of 0.810 for estimated maps.