Significance of Multi-Lead ECG Electrodes Derived from Patient-Specific Transfer Matrix

During multi-lead ECG recording, some electrodes can be identified as broken and thus information from those electrodes cannot be used for the inverse problem of electrocardiography. The objective of this study is to explore the significance of individual ECG electrodes derived from the patient-specific transfer matrix for homogeneous volume conductor. Four multi-lead ECG measurement datasets with corresponding geometries were used for this study. The transfer matrices were computed using the boundary element method. The significance of individual torso electrodes for a given position of the dipole as the equivalent heart generator was assessed by the singular value decomposition of the transfer matrices for the forward and inverse problem of electrocardiography, respectively. The study showed that the position of the most significant electrodes depends on the position of the heart within the chest and the position of the dipole as an equivalent heart generator. The positions of the first 20% of the most significant electrodes for the forward and inverse problem differ from 0% to 16%.