Use of an automatic analyzer for bipolar cardiac electrograms

A program (AP) for automatically picking (detecting and timing) local activations in bipolar cardiac electrograms has been developed. The program is used in mapping the activation sequence of the heart during normal rhythms and ventricular arrhythmias, particularly ventricular tachycardia and ventricular fibrillation, in experimental and clinical environments. The difficult conditions under which the program can be applied, the lack of technical background of many of the system´s users, and the nature of the programs which are used in conjunction with the detector required careful design of the software. The design constraints observed during the development of AP and how the system has been integrated with the rest of the hardware and software of the mapping system used in the authors´ laboratory are described