Computer Assisted Localization of a Heart Arrhythmia
This work addresses a specific medical challenge for clinicians in cardiology, offering an incremental improvement in arrhythmia localization techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of locating a point-source heart arrhythmia using catheter data by modeling it as a nonconvex feasibility problem and developing a new optimization approach and fast algorithm for online location suggestions. The procedure robustly and quickly locates arrhythmia sources without prior anatomical knowledge, as validated by Monte Carlo simulations on patient data.
We consider the problem of locating a point-source heart arrhythmia using data from a standard diagnostic procedure, where a reference catheter is placed in the heart, and arrival times from a second diagnostic catheter are recorded as the diagnostic catheter moves around within the heart. We model this situation as a nonconvex feasibility problem, where given a set of arrival times, we look for a source location that is consistent with the available data. We develop a new optimization approach and fast algorithm to obtain online proposals for the next location to suggest to the operator as she collects data. We validate the procedure using a Monte Carlo simulation based on patients' electrophysiological data. The proposed procedure robustly and quickly locates the source of arrhythmias without any prior knowledge of heart anatomy.