inhomogeneous electrodynamic model of human chest in the shape of elliptical cylinder

 

N. O. Strelkov, M. N. Kramm, G. V. Zhikhareva

Moscow Power Engineering Institute (Technical University)

Received July 12, 2011

 

Abstract. The aim of this study was to compare several torso models, which helps to analyze electric potential distributions caused by current source in conductive medium inside torso with quasi-static approximation. The necessity of such comparison comes from construction a model, which in on the one hand will be simple for electrocardiographic (ECG) signal interpretation and on the other hand will not add sufficient distortion to body surface potential map (BSPM). In this paper we presented different torso models, in which torso was constructed from elliptic cylinder with several inhomogeneities (represent heart with blood, lungs, skeletal muscle, skeletal bones, etc.). We did a comparison of BSPMs calculated from dipolar current source with help of correlation coefficient, normalized relative error, and potential levels. The results show that full inhomogeneous model (contains all inhomogeneities) has a BSPM which is similar to homogeneous torso model with correlation coefficient over 0.99.

Keywords: torso, electrocardiography, ECG forward problem, body surface potential map, inhomogeneity, medium conductivity, current streamline figure.