Improving the Estimation of Epicardial Activation Times Using Spatial Information

Atrial fibrillation is a common cardiovascular disease, affecting the regular beating of the heart through chaotic contraction of the heart's upper chambers. On its own, the condition—increasingly prevalent among the elderly—is not life threatening, but it leads to an increased risk of stroke and heart failure. As of yet, there is no consensus...

Modelling and Analysis of Atrial Epicardial Electrograms: An approach based on graph signal processing and confirmatory factor analysis

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a frequently encountered cardiac arrhythmia characterized by rapid and irregular atrial activity, which increases the risk of strokes, heart failure and other heart-related complications. The mechanisms of AF are complicated. Although various mechanisms were proposed in previous research, the precise mechanisms of AF...

Estimating atrial activity in epicardial electrograms: a beamforming perspective

The most common serious heart rhythm disease is atrial fibrillation. It is not fatal on its own but does increase the risk of heart failures and strokes. There is little understanding about the mechanisms behind the disease, so more insight is desired. Using an array of electrodes, measurements are being performed of the electrical atrial...

Joint cardiac tissue conductivity and activation time estimation using confirmatory factor analysis

Mathematical models of the electrophysiology of cardiac tissue play an important role when studying heart rhythm disorders like atrial fibrillation. Model parameters such as conductivity, activation time, and anisotropy ratio are useful parameters to determine the arrhythmogenic substrate that causes abnormalities in the atrial tissue....

Atrial fibrillation fingerprinting

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a common age-related cardiac arrhythmia. AF is characterized by rapid and irregular electrical activity of the heart leading to a higher risk of stroke and heart failure. During AF, the upper chambers of the heart, called atria, experience chaotic electrical wave propagation. However, despite the various mechanisms...

Analyzing the effect of electrode size on electrogram and activation map properties

Background: Atrial electrograms recorded from the epicardium provide an important tool for studying the initiation, perpetuation, and treatment of AF. However, the properties of these electrograms depend largely on the properties of the electrode arrays that are used for recording these signals. Method: In this study, we use the electrode's...

Local Activation Time Estimation in Atrial Electrograms Using Cross-Correlation over Higher-Order Neighbors

Atrial electrograms are often used to gain understanding on the development of atrial fibrillation (AF). Using such electrograms, cardiologists can reconstruct how the depolarization wave-front propagates across the atrium. Knowing the exact moment at which the depolarization wavefront in the tissue reaches each electrode is an important aspect...

Improved local activation time annotation of fractionated atrial electrograms for atrial mapping

Background: Local activation time (LAT) annotation in unipolar electrograms is complicated by interference from nonlocal atrial activities of neighboring tissue. This happens due to the spatial blurring that is inherent to electrogram recordings. In this study, we aim to exploit multi-electrode electrogram recordings to amplify the local...

Atrial activation time estimation using cross-correlation between higher order neighboring electrodes: In epicardial electrograms

A common cardiac arrhythmia is atrial fibrillation, which is becoming more widespread worldwide. Currently there is some understanding about the mechanisms behind atrial fibrillation, however more insight into the conduction of the atrial tissue is desired. Therefore, invasive mapping studies have been performed where an array of electrodes is...

Seasonal Dependence of Geomagnetic Active-Time Northern High-Latitude Upper Thermospheric Winds

This study is focused on improving the poorly understood seasonal dependence of northern high-latitude F region thermospheric winds under active geomagnetic conditions. The gaps in our understanding of the dynamic high-latitude thermosphere are largely due to the sparseness of thermospheric wind measurements. With current observational...