Accuracy of Epicardial Potentials Inversely Reconstructed from Body Surface Measurements

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an inverse procedure using finite elements which solves directly the Cauchy problem to reconstruct epicardial potentials from the body surface map and carry out numerical experiments to evaluate the accuracy of reconstructed epicardial maps. It is well known that, due to the ill-posedness of the inverse potential problem in electro-cardiology [1–4], the accuracy of reconstructed electrical activity of the heart depends greatly upon the number of body lead points as well as noise contained in body surface maps. We demonstrate the accuracy of reconstructed epicardial potentials under various measuring conditions of body surface maps. Finally, we apply the proposed inverse calculation procedure to real body maps collected using a body surface mapping system and show a possibility to detect the site and extent of the infarcted area by using the reconstructed epicardial map.