Comparison of four estimators of the 3D cardiac electrical activity for surface ECG synthesis from intracardiac recordings

The aim of this study is to facilitate the home follow-up of patients treated with cardiac implantable devices. A new procedure to synthesize 12-lead ECG from intracardiac EGM is proposed. It is based on the estimation of: (i) a 3D representation of the cardiac electrical activity both for ECG (VCG) and EGM (VGM), and (ii) the transfer function between the VGM and the VCG. The extraction of VCG and VGMis performed by comparing four different algorithms based on PCA and ICA, whereas the non-linear transfer function between VCG and VGM is estimated using a specific neural network. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in comparison with our previous work. Indeed, the correlation coefficients, between the real ECG and the synthesized ECG, lie between 0.78 and 0.99, whereas correlation coefficients of the previous method (combining PCA and linear Wiener filter) lie between 0.6 and 0.94.