Individualization of atrial tachycardia models for clinical applications: Performance of fiber-independent model

TL;DR

This study evaluates a fiber-independent atrial model's accuracy in simulating arrhythmias, showing high local activation time accuracy and potential for clinical use due to its simplicity and reliance on accessible data.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates that a fiber-independent model can accurately simulate atrial arrhythmias, offering a simpler alternative to fiber-dependent models for clinical applications.

Findings

Average local activation time accuracy is 96% for focal arrhythmias.

Average local activation time accuracy is 93% for rotor arrhythmias.

Fiber-independent models are promising for clinical use due to good performance and accessible data.

Abstract

One of the challenges in the development of patient-specific models of cardiac arrhythmias for clinical applications has been accounting for myocardial fiber organization. The fiber varies significantly from heart to heart, but cannot be directly measured in live tissue. The goal of this paper is to evaluate in-silico the accuracy of left atrium activation maps produced by a fiber-independent (isotropic) model with tuned diffusion coefficients, compares to a model incorporating myocardial fibers with the same geometry. For this study we utilize publicly available DT-MRI data from 7 ex-vivo hearts. The comparison is carried out in 51 cases of focal and rotor arrhythmias located in different regions of the atria. On average, the local activation time accuracy is 96% for focal and 93% for rotor arrhythmias. Given its reasonably good performance and the availability of readily accessible data for model tuning in cardiac ablation procedures, the fiber-independent model could be a promising tool for clinical applications.