JV

J.F.J. Verweij

info

Please Note

2 records found

Master thesis (2026) - J.F.J. Verweij, R.C. Hendriks, V. Yildirim, R.F. Remis
Cardiac arrhythmias affect millions of people and can cause life-threatening complications, such as heart failure, stroke and sudden cardiac death. Understanding of atrial activation characteristics at high spatial resolution is key to uncovering the mechanisms and substrate driving supra-ventricular arrhythmias, such as atrial fibrillation.

In practice, the resolution is limited by the physical constraints of electrode array placed on the cardiac surface. Due to the spatial extent of the sensing capabilities of the electrodes, inter-electrode activation characteristics are captured in their temporal signal morphology, allowing each electrode to provide a unique perspective on the same depolarization wavefront. Therefore, in this thesis, a spatial-temporal physiology based algorithm, Morphology Based Substrate Mapping (MBSM), is presented, solving an inverse source problem to reconstruct inter-electrode activation characteristics by jointly processing these electrode perspectives.

Epicardial unipolar electrograms were recorded using a rectangular electrode array with 2mm inter-electrode spacing on the right atrial wall. To validate the reconstruction method, in-silico datasets were created by simulating anatomically realistic atrial tissue slabs, providing ground-truth local activation times and substrate characteristics for quantitative validation.

The conducted simulations showed the ability of the MBSM algorithm to effectively reconstruct propagation of the depolarization wavefront with a fourfold improvement in spatial resolution (0.5 mm), yielding sub-millisecond mean absolute errors in inter-electrode local activation times. Furthermore, the reconstructed high-resolution activation strength maps enabled improved identification of regions exhibiting low conductivity and fibrosis by revealing characteristics not visible in the low-resolution clinical scenario, pointing toward improved delineation of ablation targets and evaluation of their effectiveness.

Finally, the low computational complexity, suggested noise resilience and automatic suppression of ventricular far-field signals indicate that the method is suitable for implementation in mapping systems, enabling quasi-real-time generation of high resolution conduction heterogeneity maps. ...

Genetic Algorithm Selection Methods

This thesis details the design of a selection operator used in a Genetic Algorithm. The Genetic Algorithm is used for loudspeaker filter design of three way loudspeakers for which tournament selection was chosen as selection operator. A methodology is proposed and used to tune the parameters of tournament selection, which is based on diversity and fitness of the population. Besides basic tournament selection, two new adaptive selection operators based on tournament selection are proposed to improve its functionality. The first adaptive selection operator uses noise proportional to the fitness variance of the population to improve the efficiency of the genetic algorithm. The second adaptive selection operator uses a convergence stage to speed up the convergence towards the optimal filter. After the presented tuning process in this thesis, the latter adaptive selection operator was found to perform better. The optimal selection operator and parameters found in this thesis will not translate to every application, because they heavily depend on the design and the application of the genetic algorithm. However, the presented comparison of selection operators, the provided performance metrics and design methodology can still be used to guide the choice and the tuning process of a selection operator used in any genetic algorithm. ...