Estimation of the Atrial Activity from Electrograms: A Beamforming Perspective

Abstract: Inspection of local atrial activity using atrial electrograms (EGMs) is important to determine the arrhythmogenic substrate underlying arrhythmias such as atrial fibrillation (AF). During AF, the atrial activity (AA) is often distorted by ventricular activity (VA). An effective means to remove this VA is to use a bipolar electrode configuration. However, this configuration distorts the AA as well. In this paper, AA estimation is formulated as a beamforming problem, common in the field of array signal processing. We propose two different beamformers for AA estimation. Simulations are done with synthetically generated EGMs containing VA and various degrees of AF. Compared to the standard bipolar configuration, both the proposed estimators lead to significantly less distortion on the atrial component and a better removal of the ventricular component for scenarios with a relatively low degree of AF. The current signal model is, however, less suitable for scenarios with a higher degree of AF.

Related publications

1. Estimation of the Atrial Activity from Electrograms: A Beamforming Perspective
   Tijs Moree; Mathijs S. van Schie; Natasja M. S. de Groot; Richard C. Hendriks;
   In Computing in Cardiology,
   2022.
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