Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 4.13.
Zoom of the previous figure. Top: first beat, Bottom: 11th beat
[21]. It can naturally be used with a model of the mechanics of the myocardium. Such
a coupled system would allow to complete the ECG signals with important mechan-
ical indicators, like the mean pressure in the cavities and the stroke volumes. Prelim-
inary tests have been presented in [12], neglecting the mechano-electric feedback,
i.e., the action of the deformation on the electrical activity (see, e.g., [32, 34, 37, 47]
for an overview on the cardiac electro-mechanical coupling). Future extensions of
this work will include the effect of myocardium deformation in the electrical com-
putations.
As already mentioned, an interesting feature of the proposed ECG model is the
low number of parameters it relies on. Therefore it may be a good candidate to ad-
dress the inverse problem of electrocardiography (the reconstruction of the cardiac
electrical activity from the body's surface potential) through parameter estimation.
From this perspective, it is important to reduce the complexity of the forward prob-
lem in order to keep the computational cost of the inverse problem reasonable. We
have presented preliminary results obtained with a reduced-order model based on
proper orthogonal decomposition (POD). When the parameters related to the ionic
current are perturbed or when the heart rate varies, this reduced-order model seems
