A hundred years of progress in electrocardiography 2: The rise and decline of vectorcardiography

Throughout the 20th century electrocardiography has been almost exclusively preoccupied by the single dipole concept as a model to account for body surface manifestations of cardiac electrical activity. Vectorcardiography, based on the single dipole approximation as an equivalent cardiac generator, has prevailed for over one half of this century as one of the most prominent components of electrocardiographic research. In retrospect, vectorcardiography has had conceptually an important impact on the progress in electrocardiography although it never became widely used in clinical practice. Recent comparative studies have confirmed that the diagnostic information contents of the standard 12‐lead electrocardiogram and the vectorcardiogram are practically identical if adequately powerful, identical diagnostic classification procedures are used in extracting diagnostic information. After serving a useful role as a conceptual model, vectorcardiography is gradually fading away, being replaced by more realistic cardiac source models and by body surface leads supplementing in a better way the information content of the standard ECG leads.