A New Scheme for Observation and Interpretation Atrial Fibrillation

Atrial Fibrillation (AF) is a prevalent cardiac arrhythmias in modern society. It is mainly classified into three types: paroxysmal AF, persistent AF and permanent AF. Most of AF is supposed to have more than one focus or some abnormal propagating paths. Surgical therapy has been applied to eliminate AF for almost two decades and radio frequency ablation is invented in order to efficiently deactivate the focus or cut off the abnormal propagating paths. Unfortunately, there is little effect to treatment persistent AF and permanent AF in the respect that their mechanisms are still unknown. Epicardial mapping is an important tool to investigate the cardiac arrhythmias. The purpose of our research is to develop such a system and its corresponding user interface, which depicts the electrical activity on the heart surface. In animal experiment, ten canine models are established by chronic rapid atrium pacing at a high frequency of 370-400 bpm, 128 electrodes are sutured to the exposed canine heart in three patterns: full heart, atrium only, ventricle only. 3D dynamic mapping is formed based on the sampled voltage signals on these electrodes. The isopotential mapping diagram is displayed on the user interface (UI) software as a continuous animation. This study brings forward a new scheme for observation and interpretation AF. By comparing the signal morphology on each channel and 3D whole heart isopotential mapping diagram, an approximate image of electrical activation propagation can be formed. So the implementation details of this scheme will be discussed in this study.