Atrial Fibrillation (AF) is a heart condition that causes an irregular and often abnormally fast heart rate, being the most common cardiac arrhythmia and affecting more than 6 millions of Europeans. In recent years, a large number of available treatment strategies have appeared in research of substrate evaluation methods. Regions of scar and fibrotic tissue have been identified as a potential driving region of arrhythmic activity during AF. Nowadays low voltage maps are widely used, but voltage can be patient and time dependent whilst impedance points directly to the depolarization wave. For this reason, impedance measurements can be practically implemented on intracavitary recordings and provide the information required to locate these regions, as changes in conductivity may indicate alterations in myocardium functionality.
Three different approaches are being used:
- Clinical measurements of Local Impedance in ablation procedures.
- In silico simulations using catheters and tissue modelling to know how different factors contribute to impedance measurements.
- In vitro experimentations to support both clinical and simulated studies.
References
- Boston Scientific website
- Misra, S., et al., “Field of view of mapping catheters quantified by electrogram associations with radius of myocardial attenuation on contrast-enhanced cardiac computed tomography.“
- M. S. Sulkin, et al., “Novel Measure of Local Impedance predicts Catheter-Tissue Contact and Lesion Formation”
This Project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon research and Innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska- Curie grant agreement No. 860974