A system for in-vivo cardiac optical mapping

Optical mapping of cardiac electrical activity is a valuable technique for studying arrhythmias, particularly the effects of defibrillation shocks. This technique has been exclusively applied to in-vitro preparations of hearts or tissues removed from an animal. But verification of experimental results and hypotheses is ideally performed in vivo on the heart as it remains in place in the animal. However, in-vitro optical mapping instrumentation and techniques cannot be easily applied in vivo. This article describes a system the authors developed to address this problem.