A simulation study of body surface Laplacian maps in a 3D realistically shaped inhomogeneous heart-torso model

A computer simulation study was conducted to investigate the performance of body surface Laplacian maps (BSLMs) in localizing and imaging myocardial electrical activities. A three-dimensional (3D) realistically-shaped inhomogeneous heart-torso model was used to simulate electrical signals generated by the heart. A two-site pacing protocol was employed to induce multiple simultaneously active myocardial events in a physiologically reasonable but well-controlled computational setting. The BSLMs were computed and constructed over the anterior, lateral, and posterior chest, and compared with the known myocardial electrical activities inside the heart model. Gaussian white noise was added to simulate noise-contaminated body surface measurements. The present results show that the BSLM can substantially enhance our capability of imaging and localizing multiple simultaneously active myocardial electrical events over the anterior wall of the ventricles, and improve the performance of identifying and resolving myocardial electrical events over the lateral and posterior walls of the ventricles.