Fast characterization of inducible regions of atrial fibrillation models with multi-fidelity Gaussian process classification
This work addresses the need for faster and more precise clinical applications of computational models in atrial fibrillation treatment, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackled the problem of efficiently identifying regions in the atria where arrhythmias are inducible for atrial fibrillation models, proposing a multi-fidelity Gaussian process classification method that achieved a balanced accuracy 10% higher than a baseline nearest neighbor classifier when trained with 40 samples.
Computational models of atrial fibrillation have successfully been used to predict optimal ablation sites. A critical step to assess the effect of an ablation pattern is to pace the model from different, potentially random, locations to determine whether arrhythmias can be induced in the atria. In this work, we propose to use multi-fidelity Gaussian process classification on Riemannian manifolds to efficiently determine the regions in the atria where arrhythmias are inducible. We build a probabilistic classifier that operates directly on the atrial surface. We take advantage of lower resolution models to explore the atrial surface and combine seamlessly with high-resolution models to identify regions of inducibility. When trained with 40 samples, our multi-fidelity classifier shows a balanced accuracy that is 10% higher than a nearest neighbor classifier used as a baseline atrial fibrillation model, and 9% higher in presence of atrial fibrillation with ablations. We hope that this new technique will allow faster and more precise clinical applications of computational models for atrial fibrillation.