Fusion of body surface potential and body surface Laplacian signals for electrocardiographic imaging

Various approaches to the solution to the inverse problem of electrocardiography have been proposed over the years. Recently, the use of inverse algorithms using measured body surface Laplacians has been proposed, and in various studies this technique has been shown to outperform the traditional use of body surface potentials in certain model problems. In this paper, the authors compare the use of body surface potentials and body surface Laplacians on two model problems with different assumed cardiac sources. For the spherical cap model problems with an anterior source, the epicardial estimates using body surface potentials had smaller average relative errors than when body surface Laplacians were used. For the spherical cap model problems with a posterior source, the epicardial estimates using body surface potential or body surface Laplacian sensors generally produced similar relative errors. For the radial dipole model, the epicardial estimates using body surface Laplacians had smaller errors than when body surface potentials were used. The authors introduce a fusion algorithm that combines the different types of signals and generally produces a good estimate for both model problems.