A hardware object-oriented cardiac mapping system

The heart is activated by action potentials which propagate across the heart surface and through the walls. The spatial distribution of these potentials is called the cardiac electrophysiological map which may be measured using electrode arrays. Direct cardiac mapping has been shown to increase the efficacity of surgery. Activation mapping during ventricular tachycardia for instance has been performed to guide the surgical ablation of a supposed site of origin. Spatial resolution and the time to produce the map during this invasive method are crucial to the success of the surgery. While better spatial resolution is achieved by increasing the number of recording sites, the time to produce the map is extended due to the excessive computation required to correlate the time of activation for each electrode. As the flow of recorded data increases, conventional processor-based systems are unable to cope with the level of computation and specialized devices become more appropriate to execute such repetitive tasks. Because the automated determination of activation times is a difficult task and there is no consensus concerning a standard algorithm for defining when local tissue becomes active, such specialized implementations must be flexible and can become very complex. The proposed solution relies on the authors´ novel computerized mapping system EMAP which allows objects to be linked together in order to construct the required algorithm in hardware. The system is briefly described