Local electrical characterisation of human atrial fibrillation

The rate of success of radio-frequency catheter ablation in the treatment of atrial fibrillation may be significantly improved by evaluating the local electrical properties of the atrial tissue. The aim of this study is the development of an automatic procedure for the characterisation of the local electrical activity during atrial fibrillation and the comparison of its performance with the manual analysis. The adopted procedures were the semi-automatic measurement of the local fibrillation intervals (A-A intervals) and the manual electrogram classification following the criteria suggested by Wells (1978) or Konings (1997). Two methods have been used: Principal Component Analysis and Cluster Analysis. Cross-validation of automatic results with manual analysis (percentage of type I activations in 90 sec) gives nearly 90% of accuracy for both methods. A larger database is needed to improve the clinical value of the authors´ approach