Relating the spectrum of cardiac signals to the spatiotemporal dynamics of cardiac sources

TL;DR

This study establishes a mathematical relationship between cardiac signal spectra and the spatiotemporal dynamics of cardiac sources, revealing how lead system characteristics influence spectral analysis and identifying robust spectral features.

Contribution

The paper derives a new mathematical expression linking cardiac signal spectra to source dynamics and lead system properties, enhancing understanding of spectral analysis in cardiac arrhythmias.

Findings

Lead systems distort spectral envelopes depending on spatial resolution and source correlation.

Dominant frequency remains robust across different lead systems.

Spectral features unaffected by lead system variations.

Abstract

An increasing number of studies use the spectrum of cardiac signals for analyzing the spatiotemporal dynamics of complex cardiac arrhythmias. However, the relationship between the spectrum of cardiac signals and the spatiotemporal dynamics of the underlying cardiac sources remains to date unclear. In this paper, we derive a mathematical expression relating the spectrum of cardiac signals to the spatiotemporal dynamics of cardiac sources and the measurement characteristics of the lead systems. Then, by using analytical methods and computer simulations we analyze the spectrum of cardiac signals measured by idealized lead systems during correlated and uncorrelated spatiotemporal dynamics. Our results show that lead systems can have distorting effects on the spectral envelope of cardiac signals, which depend on the spatial resolution of the lead systems and on the degree of spatiotemporal correlation of the underlying cardiac sources. In addition to this, our results indicate that the spectral features that do not depend on the spectral envelope, such as the dominant frequency, behave robustly against different choices of lead systems.