Global and Directional Activation maps for cardiac mapping in electrophysiology

Cardiac mapping is a necessary step for accurate diagnostics in cardiology. It generates an activation map of the pathways followed by the electrical depolarization wavefront during the activity of the heart. In some cases, the standard methods to construct activation maps based on the derivatives of the signals may lead to inaccurate results. In this paper, we evaluated a novel Directional Activation Algorithm (DAA) based on EGM analysis. The DAA calculates the time delays between adjacent EGMs and assigns to each a localized propagation vector. We propose a new visual representation of the depolarization wavefront as a field of arrows to facilitate comprehension of propagation pathways; and in addition, we show resultant global activation map. The accuracy of the proposed methodology is compared with known activities obtained from a monodomain, isotrope, Beeler-Reuter model of the atria.