'Color Map' of the Heart's Signals in the Works

One of the most widespread heart conditions in the world today is atrial fibrillation (AF). It affects about 4.5 million people in the European Union alone, and is therefore one of the main areas of medical research today. A collaboration of British researchers is currently working on developing a “color map” of the irregular electrical signals emanating from the heart, all of this included in a larger map featuring all the signals the organ produces. The team hopes that this tool could bring the incidence of AF cases down from the near-epidemic proportions they have at this point.

AF is in fact one of the most common forms of arrhythmia (abnormal heart rhythm) in the world. It manifests itself through fibrillations of the muscles in the left and right atrial chambers of the heart, which usually contract in a coordinated manner. Any abnormalities here mean that the flow of blood through the organ is significantly affected.

Over time, the condition can lead to a host of unpleasant side-effects, including stroke and heart failure. There are two main courses of therapy against fibrillation at this point. The first involves reducing the rate at which the organ contracts, or beats, while the second one aims at restoring the heart beat back to normal.

In the new study, experts from the University of Leicester Department of Engineering worked together with colleagues from the Department of Cardiovascular Sciences, and from the St. Jude Medical UK. The team was led by scientist Dr. Andre Ng (UL-DCS) and Dr. Fernando Schlindwein (UL-DE), who improved upon an existing treatment method, called catheter ablation. In this therapy, a thin tube is inserted into the heart, and then the cells that are responsible for the heart-rhythm disturbance are burnt through high-energy radiofrequency waves.

What the two scientists did was create a non-contact array catheter that could detect the electrical signals the heart generated during AF catheter ablation. This strategy allows for more accurate measurements of the variations in the signals, the team says, because the array does not touch the heart directly, but records everything from a distance. “This technique essentially enables us to identify regions of the heart which shows the best promise of a good outcome with ablation. Regions of the heart showing abnormal signals can be visualized using a real-time color map superimposed to the three-dimensional representation of the atrium. This allows us to pick targets for ablation with unprecedented accuracy,” Schlindwein explains.