scholarly journals Spatial-Temporal Signals and Clinical Indices in Electrocardiographic Imaging (I): Preprocessing and Bipolar Potentials

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (11) ◽  
pp. 3131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raúl Caulier-Cisterna ◽  
Margarita Sanromán-Junquera ◽  
Sergio Muñoz-Romero ◽  
Manuel Blanco-Velasco ◽  
Rebeca Goya-Esteban ◽  
...  

During the last years, Electrocardiographic Imaging (ECGI) has emerged as a powerful and promising clinical tool to support cardiologists. Starting from a plurality of potential measurements on the torso, ECGI yields a noninvasive estimation of their causing potentials on the epicardium. This unprecedented amount of measured cardiac signals needs to be conditioned and adapted to current knowledge and methods in cardiac electrophysiology in order to maximize its support to the clinical practice. In this setting, many cardiac indices are defined in terms of the so-called bipolar electrograms, which correspond with differential potentials between two spatially close potential measurements. Our aim was to contribute to the usefulness of ECGI recordings in the current knowledge and methods of cardiac electrophysiology. For this purpose, we first analyzed the basic stages of conventional cardiac signal processing and scrutinized the implications of the spatial-temporal nature of signals in ECGI scenarios. Specifically, the stages of baseline wander removal, low-pass filtering, and beat segmentation and synchronization were considered. We also aimed to establish a mathematical operator to provide suitable bipolar electrograms from the ECGI-estimated epicardium potentials. Results were obtained on data from an infarction patient and from a healthy subject. First, the low-frequency and high-frequency noises are shown to be non-independently distributed in the ECGI-estimated recordings due to their spatial dimension. Second, bipolar electrograms are better estimated when using the criterion of the maximum-amplitude difference between spatial neighbors, but also a temporal delay in discrete time of about 40 samples has to be included to obtain the usual morphology in clinical bipolar electrograms from catheters. We conclude that spatial-temporal digital signal processing and bipolar electrograms can pave the way towards the usefulness of ECGI recordings in the cardiological clinical practice. The companion paper is devoted to analyzing clinical indices obtained from ECGI epicardial electrograms measuring waveform variability and repolarization tissue properties.

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (11) ◽  
pp. 3070 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raúl Caulier-Cisterna ◽  
Manuel Blanco-Velasco ◽  
Rebeca Goya-Esteban ◽  
Sergio Muñoz-Romero ◽  
Margarita Sanromán-Junquera ◽  
...  

During the last years, attention and controversy have been present for the first commercially available equipment being used in Electrocardiographic Imaging (ECGI), a new cardiac diagnostic tool which opens up a new field of diagnostic possibilities. Previous knowledge and criteria of cardiologists using intracardiac Electrograms (EGM) should be revisited from the newly available spatial–temporal potentials, and digital signal processing should be readapted to this new data structure. Aiming to contribute to the usefulness of ECGI recordings in the current knowledge and methods of cardiac electrophysiology, we previously presented two results: First, spatial consistency can be observed even for very basic cardiac signal processing stages (such as baseline wander and low-pass filtering); second, useful bipolar EGMs can be obtained by a digital processing operator searching for the maximum amplitude and including a time delay. In addition, this work aims to demonstrate the functionality of ECGI for cardiac electrophysiology from a twofold view, namely, through the analysis of the EGM waveforms, and by studying the ventricular repolarization properties. The former is scrutinized in terms of the clustering properties of the unipolar an bipolar EGM waveforms, in control and myocardial infarction subjects, and the latter is analyzed using the properties of T-wave alternans (TWA) in control and in Long-QT syndrome (LQTS) example subjects. Clustered regions of the EGMs were spatially consistent and congruent with the presence of infarcted tissue in unipolar EGMs, and bipolar EGMs with adequate signal processing operators hold this consistency and yielded a larger, yet moderate, number of spatial–temporal regions. TWA was not present in control compared with an LQTS subject in terms of the estimated alternans amplitude from the unipolar EGMs, however, higher spatial–temporal variation was present in LQTS torso and epicardium measurements, which was consistent through three different methods of alternans estimation. We conclude that spatial–temporal analysis of EGMs in ECGI will pave the way towards enhanced usefulness in the clinical practice, so that atomic signal processing approach should be conveniently revisited to be able to deal with the great amount of information that ECGI conveys for the clinician.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (15) ◽  
pp. 5186
Author(s):  
Radek Martinek ◽  
Martina Ladrova ◽  
Michaela Sidikova ◽  
Rene Jaros ◽  
Khosrow Behbehani ◽  
...  

Advanced signal processing methods are one of the fastest developing scientific and technical areas of biomedical engineering with increasing usage in current clinical practice. This paper presents an extensive literature review of the methods for the digital signal processing of cardiac bioelectrical signals that are commonly applied in today’s clinical practice. This work covers the definition of bioelectrical signals. It also covers to the extreme extent of classical and advanced approaches to the alleviation of noise contamination such as digital adaptive and non-adaptive filtering, signal decomposition methods based on blind source separation and wavelet transform.


2019 ◽  
pp. 34-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
E.I. Chernov ◽  
N.E. Sobolev ◽  
A.A. Bondarchuk ◽  
L.E. Aristarhova

The concept of hidden correlation of noise signals is introduced. The existence of a hidden correlation between narrowband noise signals isolated simultaneously from broadband band-limited noise is theoretically proved. A method for estimating the latent correlation of narrowband noise signals has been developed and experimentally investigated. As a result of the experiment, where a time frag ent of band-limited noise, the basis of which is shot noise, is used as the studied signal, it is established: when applying the Pearson criterion, there is practically no correlation between the signal at the Central frequency and the sum of signals at mirror frequencies; when applying the proposed method for the analysis of the same signals, a strong hidden correlation is found. The proposed method is useful for researchers, engineers and metrologists engaged in digital signal processing, as well as developers of measuring instruments using a new technology for isolating a useful signal from noise – the method of mirror noise images.


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