A Second-Order Taylor-Based Approach to Electric Field Estimation in Cardiac Mapping

Joachim Kröner1, Massimo W Rivolta2, Roberto Sassi2
1Dipartimento di Informatica, Università  degli Studi di Milano, 2Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Milano


Abstract

In modern electrophysiology, ablation therapy for supraventricular arrhythmias is guided by local voltage and conduction velocity. State-of-the-art mapping techniques use multiple bipolar electrogram measurements to assess these quantities, both of which depend on the estimation of the electric field. This field is commonly approximated using a first-order Taylor expansion. To improve the approximation of its two-dimensional projection, we propose a second-order expansion of the electric potential by extending the least-squares estimation to include the additional parameters required to approximate the Hessian matrix. Electric-field estimates obtained using first- and second-order Taylor expansions are compared with a reference field derived from a finite-difference approximation to the negative extracellular potential gradient. The latter is generated by simulating two scenarios in a cuboid tissue slab: a planar and a curved wavefront. We investigate the effects of the number of bipolar measurements and their distances from the reference location. Compared with the reference field, the second-order Taylor method yields a greater improvement over the first-order method for the curved wave than for the planar wave. Specifically, the mean relative RMSE difference between the second- and first-order methods decreases from -4.44 % for the planar wave to -15.02 % for the curved wave.