Assessing cardiac tissue function via action potential wave imaging using cardiac displacement data

Abstract

The ability to visualize action potentials deep within the walls of the heart has important applications. It enables the identification of regions of electrically and mechanically compromised tissue that can mark the location(s) of infarcted and ischemic myocardial tissue, and also permits the visualization of normal and abnormal action potential wave propagation patterns for use in both clinical and cardiac research settings. Recently, we have been investigating the possibility of using 4-D mechanical deformation data, obtained either from MRI or ultrasound images, to reverse-calculate these action potential patterns [2, 4, 5]. This idea has also been studied by Konofagou et al. [6], who used mixed time and space second derivatives in the displacement fields to identify the location of action potentials. While this mixed-derivative method should be effective for spatially one-dimensional action potentials, it is less effective when propagation of the waves is fundamentally three-dimensional.