The inverse problem of electrocardiography: Recovery of human heart surface potentials

A three dimensional model of the thorax was developed from serial CT images of a patient. The finite element method was used to construct a transfer matrix relating the epicardial potentials to the body surface potentials. To solve the inverse problem, different inverse methods based on regularization or regularization-truncation were applied using electrocardiographic data from the same patient whose anatomical data was used to construct the torso model. The recovered pre-excitation activity at the begining of the QRS complex closely resembles the invasively measured data obtained during arrhythmia surgery.