A saline tank study of a catheter guiding method for ablative therapy of cardiac arrhythmias by application of an inverse solution to body surface electrocardiographic signals

This study investigates in a saline tank study the effectiveness of an inverse algorithm designed to guide the ablative therapy of cardiac arrhythmias. In this process both the site of origin of the arrhythmia and current pulses delivered from the tip of a catheter are modeled with a single equivalent moving dipole (SEMD) model in an infinite homogeneous volume conductor. However, because of lack of accurate torso geometry, the algorithm introduces systematic error in the estimated compared to the true dipole position. Computer simulations and experiments using a homogeneous saline tank have shown that this systematic error has minor effect in guiding the tip of the catheter to the site of the origin of the arrhythmia. In this study, to further investigate the accuracy of this method, we conducted experiments using a heterogeneous volume-conductor tank model. Our results demonstrate that the final distance between the catheter tip and the target site is about 3 mm and thus the lack of accurate torso geometry in the inverse problem appears to have minor effect in guiding the catheter.