title: Spatial variability of the 12-lead surface ECG as a tool for noninvasive prediction of catheter ablation outcome in persistent atrial fibrillation.
abstract: Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common sustained cardiac arrhythmia encountered in clinical practice. Radiofrequency catheter ablation (CA) is increasingly employed to treat this disease, yet the selection of persistent AF patients who will benefit from this treatment remains a challenging task. Several parameters of the surface electrocardiogram (ECG) have been analyzed in previous works to predict AF termination by CA, such as fibrillatory wave (f-wave) amplitude. However, they are usually manually computed and only a subset of electrodes is inspected. In this study, a novel perspective of the role of f-wave amplitude as a potential noninvasive predictor of CA outcome is adopted by exploring ECG interlead spatial variability. An automatic procedure for atrial amplitude computation based on cubic Hermite interpolation is first proposed. To describe the global f-wave peak-to-peak amplitude distribution, signal contributions from multiple leads are then combined by condensing the most representative features of the atrial signal in a reduced-rank approximation based on principal component analysis (PCA). We show that exploiting ECG spatial diversity by means of this PCA-based multilead approach does not only increase the robustness to electrode selection, but also substantially improves the predictive power of the amplitude parameter.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire d'Informatique, Signaux et Systèmes de Sophia Antipolis, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, CNRS, Sophia Antipolis 06903 CEDEX, France. meo@i3s.unice.fr
authors.forename: Marianna
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Meo
authors.forename: Vicente
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Zarzoso
authors.forename: Olivier
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Meste
authors.forename: Decebal Gabriel
authors.initials: DG
authors.lastname: Latcu
authors.forename: Nadir
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Saoudi
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001281:Atrial Fibrillation / Q000601:surgery*; D017115:Catheter Ablation / Q000379:methods*; D004562:Electrocardiography / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods; D006801:Humans; D025341:Principal Component Analysis; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D018709:Statistics, Nonparametric