A Neural Latent Dynamics Approach for Solving Inverse Problems in Cardiac Electrophysiology

TL;DR

This paper introduces a neural latent dynamics framework using LDNet to efficiently solve inverse cardiac electrophysiology problems, enabling rapid parameter recovery from ECG data.

Contribution

It presents a novel data-driven surrogate model that reduces computational complexity in cardiac inverse problems using neural ODE-based latent dynamics.

Findings

Achieves accurate cardiac parameter reconstruction from synthetic data.

Reduces computational time significantly compared to traditional methods.

Validates effectiveness in both 2D and 3D geometries.

Abstract

Solving inverse problems in cardiac electrophysiology consists in the recovery of physiological parameters from surface electrocardiogram (ECG) measurements, a task which is often computationally unfeasible due to the severe ill-posedness and the prohibitive computational complexity of PDE-constrained optimization. In this work, we introduce a data-driven framework leveraging Latent Dynamics Networks (LDNets) to construct efficient surrogate models of the forward operator. By mapping low-dimensional parameters, representing ectopic activation sites or ischemic region descriptors, to the ECG signals via latent dynamics governed by neural ordinary differential equations, our approach circumvents the computational burden of evaluating high-fidelity cardiac models during iterative parameter estimation. The surrogate is trained offline on high-fidelity data, enabling rapid and robust inversion. We validate the proposed framework through rigorous numerical experiments with synthetic data across both 2d and 3d geometries. Results show that the LDNet-based surrogate achieves precise reconstruction of cardiac parameters while drastically reducing computational overhead, thereby enabling near real-time clinical applications.