Reconstruction of atrial excitation conduction velocities and implementation into the inverse problem of electrocardiography

Abstract

An exact diagnosis of the heart's electrophysiological behaviour is currently linked to invasive catheter interventions. A reconstruction of electrophysiological properties from non-invasive ECG data would be preferred. This requires solving the so-called inverse problem of electrocardiography which, however, is strongly underdetermined. Therefore, it needs a priori knowledge to be solvable in a reliable manner. This paper presents a method to calculate excitation conduction velocities (ECV) from activation times and an implementation into an inverse solver of activation times. The sole calculation of ECVs achieved a mean relative error of 0:0916±0:0744. In addition, an inverse solver for activation times is tested with an adaption scheme for the related ECVs and without. The resulting mean relative error of the ECVs improved from 0:3228±0:2768 to 0:2715±0:2318 using the adaption of ECVs. © 2012 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston.