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Acceleration of FEM-based transfer matrix computation for forward and inverse problems of electrocardiography

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Abstract

The distributions of transmembrane voltage (TMV) within the cardiac tissue are linearly connected with the patient’s body surface potential maps (BSPMs) at every time instant. The matrix describing the relation between the respective distributions is referred to as the transfer matrix. This matrix can be employed to carry out forward calculations in order to find the BSPM for any given distribution of TMV inside the heart. Its inverse can be used to reconstruct the cardiac activity non-invasively, which can be an important diagnostic tool in the clinical practice.The computation of this matrix using the finite element method can be quite time-consuming. In this work, a method is proposed allowing to speed up this process by computing an approximate transfer matrix instead of the precise one. The method is tested on three realistic anatomical models of real-world patients. It is shown that the computation time can be reduced by 50% without loss of accuracy.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Biosense Webster for financial support as well as Prof. Dr. med., Dr. rer. nat. W.R. Bauer and Dr. med. C. Kaltwasser from University Hospital of Würzburg, Germany, who provided the patient data employed in this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CST Computer Simulation Technology AG, Bad Nauheimer Straße 19, 64289, Darmstadt, Germany

    Dmytro Farina

  2. Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of Karlsruhe (TH), Kaiserstraße 12, 76128, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Y. Jiang & O. Dössel

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  1. Dmytro Farina
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  2. Y. Jiang
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  3. O. Dössel
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Correspondence to Dmytro Farina.

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Farina, D., Jiang, Y. & Dössel, O. Acceleration of FEM-based transfer matrix computation for forward and inverse problems of electrocardiography. Med Biol Eng Comput 47, 1229–1236 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-009-0503-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-009-0503-7

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