Noninvasive threedimensional cardiac activation imaging from body surface potential maps: a computational and experimental study on a rabbit model

Abstract—Three-dimensional (3-D) cardiac activation imaging (3-DCAI) is a recently developed technique that aims at imaging the activation sequence throughout the the ventricular my-ocardium. 3-DCAI entails the modeling and estimation of the cardiac equivalent current density (ECD) distribution from which the activation time at any myocardial site is determined as the time point with the peak amplitude of local ECD estimates. In this paper, we report, for the first time, an in vivo validation study assessing the feasibility of 3-DCAI in comparison with the 3-D intracardiac mapping, for a group of four healthy rabbits undergoing the ventricular pacing from various locations. During the experiments, the body surface potentials and the intramural bipolar electrical recordings were simultaneously measured in a closed-chest condition. The ventricular activation sequence noninvasively imaged from the body surface measurements b