Method for the computerised display of epicardial maps

Abstract

Epicardial mapping is an important method for locating the accurate portion of the accessory pathway. Mapping is usually executed by measuring the time of the major deflection (the activation time) between two electrodes about 1 mm apart. The epicardial isochrone map is made up of contour lines connecting points with an equal activation time on the epicardium. The paper describes a newly developed microcomputer-based system for drawing epicardial isochrone maps. In this system, a simplified algorithm is introduced to extract the excitation delay from intracardiac reference signals and epicardial activation signals. By applying the B-Spline function to drawing the excitation map, an excitation pattern which is similar to the original is, obtained for each standard excitation pattern.