Cardiodynamic complexity: Electrocardiographic characterization of arrhythmic foci

Abstract

The electrical activity of the heart consists of nonlinear interactions emerging as a complex system. As such, proper characterization of arrhythmias and arrhythmogenic areas requires nonlinear analysis methods. Electrocardiographic imaging provides a full spatiotemporal picture of the electric potential on the human epicardium. Rhythm reflects the connection topology of the pacemaker cells driving it. Hence, characterizing the attractors as nonlinear, effective dynamics can capture the key parameters without imposing any particular microscopic model on the empirical signals. A dynamic phase-space reconstruction from an appropriate embedding can be made robust and numerically stable with the presented method. We show that both the phase-space descriptors and those of the a priori unrelated singularity analysis are able to highlight the arrhythmogenic areas on cases of atrial fibrillation.