Independent Component Analysis of Body Surface Potential Mapping Recordings with Atrial Fibrillation

Body surface potential mapping BSPM is an advanced electrocardiographic technique aimed at estimating the global potential distribution by recording potentials at multiple sites on the thoracic surface. In patients with atrial fibrillation the recorded potentials can be modelled as a linear mixture of the statistically independent atrial and ventricular activities. In order to extract atrial activity from surface recordings, we propose the independent component analysis of 64-lead BSPM recordings with atrial fibrillation. We apply also ICA to the 12-lead classical ECG and compare the results. This analysis shows that increasing the number of leads not only improves the quality of the extraction of the atrial activity but it allows an optimization of the localization of the leads. We introduce also a new index to measure the quality of the extraction. The BSPM recordings can also be used to obtain the best locations in order to select the minimum number of leads required to extract the AA, an important feature for long time recordings.