Toward Clinically-Feasible Noninvasive Electrophysiological Imaging: Investigating the Impact of Local Anatomical Details

Noninvasive Cardiac electrophysiological (EP) imaging aims to compute cardiac electrical dynamics from body surface potential. Anatomical data acquisition and processing computations, to reconstruct detailed geometry of heart and torso, are complex and time consuming tasks that are incompatible with clinical requirements. Our ultimate goal is to improve noninvasive EP imaging techniques toward clinical feasibility by investigating the minimum anatomical information. As the first step toward this goal, in this study we investigate the impact of local geometrical details on cardiac EP imaging. It is known that, global geometrical factors such as size, position and orientation of heart are important in noninvasive electrocardiography problem; but the effect of local geometrical details is unknown and it is difficult to accurately capture. We hypothesize that, as long as global geometrical parameters are captured, local details of realistic cardiac geometry do not significantly impact diagnostic effectiveness of cardiac EP imaging. We verify this hypothesis by developing simple geometrical model instead of realistic heart that enables us to measure local anatomical error, and applying it in EP imaging for detection of myocardial infarction. The results computed based on simple geometrical model are comparable to that of the realistic heart geometry. Thus, it confirms our hypothesis that discarding local geometrical details does not affect diagnostic cardiac EP imaging. The findings of this study pave the road for further studies on tomographic input data processing toward clinical feasibility.