Estimation of electrical pathways finding minimal cost paths from electro-anatomical mapping of the left ventricle

Abstract

The electrical activation of the heart is a complex physiological process that is essential for the understanding of several cardiac dysfunctions, such as ventricular tachycardia (VT). Nowadays, electroanatomical mappings of patient-specific activation times on the left ventricle surface can be estimated, providing crucial information to the clinicians for guiding cardiac treatment. However, some electrical pathways of particular interest such as Purkinje or still viable conduction channels are difficult to interpret in these maps. We present here a novel method to find some of these electrical pathways using minimal cost paths computations on surface maps. Experiments to validate the proposed method have been carried out in simulated data, and also in clinical data, showing good performance on recovering the main characteristics of simulated Purkinje trees (e.g. end-terminals) and promising results on a real case of fascicular VT. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.