Morphology quantification of atrial fibrillation under propofol using principal components analysis

The effect of the most useful anaesthetic in cardiovascular therapy, called propofol, was evaluated in patients with atrial fibrillation (AF). In order to represent the electrogram recordings in a more efficient manner Principal component analysis (PCA) has been applied. Moreover, to reduce the data set to a few representative activations PCA was applied again to measure the average dissimilarity between consecutive activations of an intracardiac signal. In addition PCA was applied directly to the activations extracted from each dipole to analysis temporal varibility, and spatial variability with the comparation of the signals from different dipoles. The proposed indexes show different behaviour patterns along the atrial area during the anaesthetic effects.