A catheter guiding method for ablative therapy of cardiac arrhythmias by application of an inverse solution to body surface electrocardiographic signals

This study investigates the effectiveness of an algorithm in guiding the ablative therapy of cardiac arrhythmias. In this process both the site of origin of the arrhythmia and current pulses delivered from the tip of the catheter are modeled with a single equivalent moving dipole (SEMD) model in an infinite homogeneous volume conductor. Because of the lack of accurate torso geometry, the algorithm introduces systematic error in the estimated compared to the true dipole position. Computer simulations have shown that this systematic error has minor influence in guiding the tip of the catheter to the site of the origin of the arrhythmia. In this study, to further investigate the accuracy of this method, we conducted experiments using a 0.9% saline volume-conductor. Our results demonstrate that the final distance between the catheter tip and the target site is less than 3 mm and thus the lack of accurate torso geometry may have minor influence in the catheter guidance.