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Atrial fibrosis identification with unipolar electrogram eigenvalue distribution analysis in multi-electrode arrays

Abstract:

Abstract: Atrial fibrosis plays a key role in the initiation and progression of atrial fibrillation (AF). Atrial fibrosis is typically identified by a peak-to-peak amplitude of bipolar electrograms (b-EGMs) lower than 0.5 mV, which may be considered as ablation targets. Nevertheless, this approach disregards signal spatiotemporal information and b-EGM sensitivity to catheter orientation. To overcome these limitations, we propose the dominant-to-remaining eigenvalue dominance ratio (EIGDR) of unipolar electrograms (u-EGMs) within neighbor electrode cliques as a waveform dispersion measure, hypothesizing that it is correlated with the presence of fibrosis. A simulated 2D tissue with a fibrosis patch was used for validation. We computed EIGDR maps from both original and time-aligned u-EGMs, denoted as R and RA, respectively, also mapping the gain in eigenvalue concentration obtained by the alignment, Δ RA. The performance of each map in detecting fibrosis was evaluated in scenarios including noise and variable electrode-tissue distance. Best results were achieved by RA, reaching 94% detection accuracy, versus the 86% of b-EGMs voltage maps. The proposed strategy was also tested in real u-EGMs from fibrotic and non-fibrotic areas over 3D electroanatomical maps, supporting the ability of the EIGDRs as fibrosis markers, encouraging further studies to confirm their translation to clinical settings. Graphical Abstract: Upper panels: map of RA from 3×3 cliques for Ψ= 0∘ and bipolar voltage map Vb-m, performed assuming a variable electrode-to-tissue distance and noisy u-EGMs (noise level σv = 46.4 μV). Lower panels: detected fibrotic areas (brown), using the thresholds that maximize detection accuracy of each map [Figure not available: see fulltext.]