Rotor pivot point identification with intrinsic mode function complexity index using empirical mode decomposition

Atrial Fibrillation (AF), a most common cardiac arrhythmia affects more than 2.3 million people in the US and associated with increased risk of stroke, heart failure and death. Cather ablation to treat paroxysmal AF patients is somewhat successful with challenges remaining to accurately identify the active sites for persistent AF patients which may occur outside the pulmonary vein (PV) region due to inadequate cardiac mapping systems. In this work, the authors propose an Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) approach using multi-scale entropy estimates of the intrinsic mode functions as a complexity measure to accurately identify pivot point of the rotor that were induced in ex-vivo isolated rabbit heart with Ventricular Tachycardia (VT). The new approach using EMD demonstrated successful identification of the rotor core region providing better contrast relative to the periphery region. Validation of the EMD approach using intra-atrial electrograms from paroxysmal and persistent AF patients with rotors is required to accurately identify the rotor pivot point to guide AF ablation.