title: Noninvasive assessment of the complexity and stationarity of the atrial wavefront patterns during atrial fibrillation.
abstract: A novel automated approach to quantitatively evaluate the degree of spatio-temporal organization in the atrial activity (AA) during atrial fibrillation (AF) from surface recordings, obtained from body surface potential maps (BSPM), is presented. AA organization is assessed by measuring the reflection of the spatial complexity and temporal stationarity of the wavefront patterns propagating inside the atria on the surface ECG, by means of principal component analysis (PCA). Complexity and stationarity are quantified through novel parameters describing the structure of the mixing matrices derived by the PCA of the different AA segments across the BSPM recording. A significant inverse correlation between complexity and stationarity is highlighted by this analysis. The discriminatory power of the parameters in identifying different groups in the set of patients under study is also analyzed. The obtained results present analogies with earlier invasive studies in terms of number of significant components necessary to describe 95% of the variance in the AA (four for more organized AF, and eight for more disorganized AF). These findings suggest that automated analysis of AF organization exploiting spatial diversity in surface recordings is indeed possible, potentially leading to an improvement in clinical decision making and AF treatment.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire d'Informatique, Signaux et Systèmes de Sophia Antipolis (I3S), Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis/Centre Nationalde la Recherche Scientifique, Sophia Antipolis, 06903 France. bonizzi@i3s.unice.fr
authors.forename: Pietro
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Bonizzi
authors.forename: María de la Salud
authors.initials: Mde L
authors.lastname: Guillem
authors.forename: Andreu M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Climent
authors.forename: Jose
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Millet
authors.forename: Vicente
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Zarzoso
authors.forename: Francisco
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Castells
authors.forename: Olivier
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Meste
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001281:Atrial Fibrillation / Q000503:physiopathology*; D018780:Body Surface Potential Mapping / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D004562:Electrocardiography / Q000379:methods*; D005260:Female; D006325:Heart Atria / Q000503:physiopathology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D025341:Principal Component Analysis; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted