Reduction of Effects of Noise on the Inverse Problem of Electrocardiography with Bayesian Estimation

Body Surface Potential Mapping: Contemporary Applications and Future Perspectives

Body surface potential mapping (BSPM) is a noninvasive modality to assess cardiac bioelectric activity with a rich history of practical applications for both research and clinical investigation. BSPM provides comprehensive acquisition of bioelectric signals across the entire thorax, allowing for more complex and extensive analysis than the standard electrocardiogram (ECG). Despite its advantages, BSPM is not a common clinical tool. BSPM does, however, serve as a valuable research tool and as an input for other modes of analysis such as electrocardiographic imaging and, more recently, machine learning and artificial intelligence. In this report, we examine contemporary uses of BSPM, and provide an assessment of its future prospects in both clinical and research environments. We assess the state of the art of BSPM implementations and explore modern applications of advanced modeling and statistical analysis of BSPM data. We predict that BSPM will continue to be a valuable research tool, and will find clinical utility at the intersection of computational modeling approaches and artificial intelligence.

A Unified Pipeline for ECG Imaging Testing

The Consortium for ECG Imaging (CEI) has formed several collaborative projects to evaluate and improve technical aspects of Electrocardiographic Imaging (ECGI), but these efforts are not yet implemented into an integrated software framework. We developed a framework to unify the multiple techniques and stages of ECGI into one pipeline. This framework merges existing open source packages: SCIRun, a problem solving environment; the Forward/Inverse toolkit, a series of SCIRun modules for ECGI; and PFEIFER, a cardiac signal pre-processing tool. The Unified ECGI Toolkit (UETK), combined with the EDGAR dataset, allows users to test and validate a vast array of parameters within each stage of the ECGI pipeline. We expect that this unified tool will help introduce new researchers to ECGI, facilitate interaction between the various groups working on ECGI, and establish a common approach for researchers to test and validate their ECGI techniques.