Forward Electrocardiogram Modeling by Small Dipoles Based on Whole-Body Electric Field Analysis

Abstract

Mathematical modeling of detailed cardiac function has become possible in recent years. Computer simulations have been conducted to reproduce electrical phenomena of the heart. However, substantial effort and computational cost are required to construct an electrocardiogram (ECG) generation model based on multiple parameters of cardiac tissue. In addition, most previous studies simplified the anatomy and the region of the body considered. Such modeling may not be applicable for the system design of wearable sensing in ECG. In this study, we propose a computational model of ECG generation with multiple electric dipoles to reduce the complexity and computational cost of ECG modeling. In this study, first, the electrical potential distribution on the surface of an anatomically detailed model was computed with volume conductor (electrical) analysis. We subsequently simulated the propagation of the electrical excitation of the heart by sequentially placing electric dipoles according to conduction velocity. Our computational results demonstrate the effectiveness of the ECG model using electric dipoles in comparison with measurement and the necessity to discuss the ground in a 12-lead ECG for the whole-body model. The required computational time was less than 30 min even in a workstation (2 CPUs, 28 cores, and 2.20 GHz), i.e., significantly less than those of previous studies.

Keywords

• Electrocardiography
• electromagnetic modeling
• finite difference methods