Automated detection of qualitative patio-temporal features in electrocardiac activation maps/I>
by Liliana Ironi, Stefania Tentoni
in Artificial Intelligence in Medicine , 39, (2007), 99-111.
ABSTRACT
Objective -- This paper describes a piece of work aiming at the
realization of a tool for the automated interpretation of electrocardiac maps.
Such maps can capture a number of electrical conduction pathologies,
such as arrhytmia, that can be missed by the analysis of traditional electrocardiograms. But, their
introduction into the clinical practice is still far away as their interpretation requires skills
that belongs to very few experts. Then, an automated interpretation
tool would bridge the gap between the established research outcome and
clinical practice with a consequent great impact on health care.
Methods and Material -- Qualitative spatial reasoning can play a
crucial role in the identification of spatio-temporal patterns and salient
features that characterize the heart electrical activity. We adopted the
spatial aggregation (SA) conceptual framework and an interplay of numerical
and qualitative information to extract features from epicardial maps,
and to make them available for reasoning tasks.
Results -- Our focus is on epicardial activation isochrone maps as they
are a synthetic representation of spatio-temporal aspects of the propagation
of the electrical excitation. We provide a computational SA-based methodology to
extract, from 3D epicardial data gathered over time, (1) the excitation wavefront
structure, and (2) the salient features that characterize wavefront propagation and visually correspond to specific geometric objects.
Conclusion -- The proposed methodology provides a robust and
efficient way to identify salient pieces of information in activation time maps. The
hierarchical structure of the abstracted geometric objects, crucial in capturing the prominent information, facilitates the definition of
general rules necessary to infer the correlation between
pathophysiological patterns and wavefront structure and
propagation.
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Liliana Ironi