Cardiac Activation Maps Reconstruction: A Comparative Study Between Data-Driven and Physics-Based Methods.

One of the essential diagnostic tools of cardiac arrhythmia is activation mapping. Noninvasive current mapping procedures include electrocardiographic imaging. It allows reconstructing heart surface potentials from measured body surface potentials. Then, activation maps are generated using the heart surface potentials. Recently, a study suggests to deploy artificial neural networks to estimate activation maps directly from body surface potential measurements. Here we carry out a comparative study between the data-driven approach DirectMap and noninvasive classic technique based on reconstructed heart surface potentials using both Finite element method combined with L1-norm regularization (FEM-L1) and the spatial adaptation of Time-delay neural networks (SATDNN-AT). In this work, we assess the performance of the three approaches using a synthetic single paced-rhythm dataset generated on the atria surface. The results show that data-driven approach DirectMap quantitatively outperforms the two other methods. In fact, we observe an absolute activation time error and a correlation coefficient, respectively, equal to 7.20 ms, 93.2% using DirectMap, 14.60 ms, 76.2% using FEM-L1 and 13.58 ms, 79.6% using SATDNN-AT. In addition, results show that data-driven approaches (DirectMap and SATDNN-AT) are strongly robust against additive gaussian noise compared to FEM-L1.

Evaluation of Fifteen Algorithms for the Resolution of the Electrocardiography Imaging Inverse Problem Using ex-vivo and in-silico Data.

The electrocardiographic imaging inverse problem is ill-posed. Regularization has to be applied to stabilize the problem and solve for a realistic solution. Here, we assess different regularization methods for solving the inverse problem. In this study, we assess (i) zero order Tikhonov regularization (ZOT) in conjunction with the Method of Fundamental Solutions (MFS), (ii) ZOT regularization using the Finite Element Method (FEM), and (iii) the L1-Norm regularization of the current density on the heart surface combined with FEM. Moreover, we apply different approaches for computing the optimal regularization parameter, all based on the Generalized Singular Value Decomposition (GSVD). These methods include Generalized Cross Validation (GCV), Robust Generalized Cross Validation (RGCV), ADPC, U-Curve and Composite REsidual and Smoothing Operator (CRESO) methods. Both simulated and experimental data are used for this evaluation. Results show that the RGCV approach provides the best results to determine the optimal regularization parameter using both the FEM-ZOT and the FEM-L1-Norm. However for the MFS-ZOT, the GCV outperformed all the other regularization parameter choice methods in terms of relative error and correlation coefficient. Regarding the epicardial potential reconstruction, FEM-L1-Norm clearly outperforms the other methods using the simulated data but, using the experimental data, FEM based methods perform as well as MFS. Finally, the use of FEM-L1-Norm combined with RGCV provides robust results in the pacing site localization.