Hardware and software design for automated cardiac mapping

Sudden cardiac death (SCD) remains the major cause of death in the USA. By measuring the sequence of cardiac excitation, cardiac mapping enhances our understanding of the underlying mechanisms of arrhythmias leading to SCD. A cardiac mapping system has been developed to measure heart or body surface potentials, and provide real time analysis and display of cardiac activity. The mapping system hardware consists of low-power ECG amplifiers and state of the art digital data acquisition and control modules for efficient and reliable data collection. The mapping system software design consists of algorithms for automated detection of activation times from extracellular electrograms. We found that simultaneous analysis of unipolar and bipolar electrograms was superior to either unipolar or bipolar analysis exclusively. This thesis describes: (1) the hardware and software design of the mapping system and (2) the novel approach of simultaneous analysis of unipolar and bipolar electrograms during atrial fibrillation.