Noninvasive imaging of electrophysiological substrates in post myocardial infarction

Abstract

The presence of injured tissues after myocardial infarction (MI) creates substrates responsible for fatal arrhythmia; understanding of its arrhythmogenic mechanism requires investigation of the correlation of local abnormality between phenomenal electrical functions and inherent electrophysiological properties during normal sinus rhythm. This paper presents a physiological-model-constrained framework for imaging post-MI electrophysiological substrates from noninvasive body surface potential measurements. Using a priori knowledge of general cardiac electrical activity as constraints, it simultaneously reconstruct transmembrane potential dynamics and tissue excitability inside the 3D myocardium, with the central goal to localize and investigate the abnormality in these two different electrophysiological quantities. It is applied to four post-MI patients with quantitative validations by gold standards and notable improvements over existent results. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.