Non-invasive estimation of myocardial infarction by means of a heart-model-based imaging approach: a simulation study

In the study, a new myocardial infarction (MI) estimation method was developed for estimating MI in the three-dimensional myocardium by means of a heart-model-based inverse approach. The site and size of MI are estimated from body surface electrocardiograms by minimising multiple objective functions of the measured body surface potential maps (BSPMs) and the heart-model-generated BSPMs. Computer simulations were conducted to evaluate the performance of the developed method, using a single-site MI and dual-site MI protocols. The simulation results show that, for the single-site MI, the averaged spatial distance (SD) between the weighting centres of the 'true' and estimated MIs, and the averaged relative error (RE) between the numbers of the 'true' and estimated infarcted units are 3.0 +/- 0.6/3.6 +/- 0.6 mm and 0.11 +/- 0.02/0.14 +/- 0.02, respectively, when 5 muV/10 muV Gaussian white noise was added to the body surface potentials. For the dual-site MI, the averaged SD between the weighting centres of the 'true' and estimated MIs, and the averaged RE between the numbers of the 'true' and estimated intarcted units are 3.8 +/- 0.7/3.9 +/- 0.7 mm and 0.12 +/- 0.02/0.14 +/- 0.03, respectively, when 5 muV/10 muV Gaussian white noise was added to the body surface potentials. The simulation results suggest the feasibility of applying the heart-model-based imaging approach to the estimation of myocardial infarction from body surface potentials.