A New Approach To Electrcardiographic Inverse Problem Studies: Solution In Terms Of Heart-torso Model Parameters

Previous electrocardiographic inverse problem studies have focused on deducing equivalent heart sources or reconstructing epicardial potentials from the measured body surface potentials. Many equivalent representations of the cardiac sources can be used. We do not know in advance which equivalent representation is more suitable, we can employ the equivalent representation in this way or in that way. Even if the employed equivalent representation is suitable for cardiac sources, the inverse solutions are not accurate because of the ill-posed nature of the inverse problem. So the inverse problem in terms of equivalent heart sources has little applicability. For the inverse problem in terms of epicardial potentials, theoretically, the reconstructed epicardial potentials' posses higher diagnosis resolution compared with the body surface potentials, however, the inverse solutions of this approach are also not accurate enough for clinical applications. The most shortcoming of these two approaches is that both of them have not related the body surface potentials to the excitation propagation process in the heart.The developments of the excitation propagation-type heart models (forward problems) enable us to study the relationship between the body surface potentials and the excitation propagation of the heart. Combining the forward problem with the inverse problem can produce a new approach to the inverse problem, i.e., solutions in terms of heart-torso model parameters, which was introduced by us for the first time in the world. In the heart-torso model, the heart excitation propagation depends on a set of model parameters, so the heart excitation propagation should be determined if we can deduce the model parameters from the body surface potentials. The most important advantage of this approach is that the quantitative information of the heart disease (the position, the range and the seizure degree of the focus, etc.) could be determined from examination of the recovered heart-torso model parameters.The author has done the following research work:1. Research work on electrocardiographic inverse problemAfter reviewing the previous electrocardiographic inverse problem studies, the author introduced a new approach to electrocardiographic inverse problem studies, i.e., solutions in terms of heart-torso model parameters, and designed a research scheme. To verify the validation of the new method, the author used the approach to localize the site of ventricular preexcitation with simulated body surface potential data in mimic patients with Wolff-Parkinson-White (WPW) syndrome. The inverse recovered preexcitation site was in close agreement with the true preexcitation site, usually the position error...