Key result
CADENCE matches expert observer agreement across key optical mapping electrophysiology metrics.
Why the study?
Existing software for cardiac optical mapping signal processing have features siloed across platforms, requiring multiple packages for comprehensive analysis.
CADENCE provides an accurate, open-source, and standardized end-to-end software pipeline for processing and analyzing cardiac optical mapping data, offering performance comparable to expert human observers.
Provides validated open-source tool for multi-modal optical mapping; leaves open standardization across arrhythmia research centers.
Optical mapping is a fundamental tool for cardiac electrophysiology research. Processing of these signals can be non-trivial, requiring multiple pre- and post-processing steps to limit interpretation errors. Existing software packages have features siloed across platforms and require users to combine several packages for in-depth analysis. To address this, we developed CADENCE, an open-source MATLAB-based application combining feature breadth (e.g., SVD denoising, conduction velocity, alternans, annotated rotors) and depth (e.g., 15 independent alternans features across both voltage and calcium modalities) in an end-to-end pipeline including data conversion, signal conditioning, feature extraction, and signal analysis. We demonstrate CADENCE's capabilities across datasets spanning four species (rat, rabbit, pig, and human), three tissue preparations (slices, wedge, and whole heart), and three camera configurations (single, dual, and panoramic). CADENCE was validated against three blinded expert observers (15 hearts) and demonstrated agreement comparable to inter-observer variability (SD ratios 1.07/0.95/0.89 for APD80, activation, CaTD80). Dominant frequency was recovered with a median error of 0.03% across 84 of 88 paced recordings with 1:1 capture. CADENCE's code is publicly available and distributed as a compiled standalone application that the end-user can install and run without a MATLAB license to encourage adoption and standardization across laboratories.
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Aras et al. (2026) studied Cardiac optical mapping data analysis (n=15). CADENCE software vs. Blinded manual marking by three expert observers was evaluated on Validation of extracted metrics (APD80, activation time, CaTD80) against blinded manual marking (measured as SD ratio of CADENCE vs human to human vs human) (SD ratios 1.07, 0.95, and 0.89 for APD80, activation time, and CaTD80). CADENCE demonstrated agreement with expert observers comparable to inter-observer variability, with SD ratios of 1.07, 0.95, and 0.89 for APD80, activation time, and CaTD80.
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