Prediction of Atrial Fibrillation Recurrence by Pulmonary Vein Electrogram Correlation

Raquel Cervigón1, Javier Moreno2, José Millet3, Francisco Castells3
1UCLM, 2Hospital Ramón y Cajal, 3UPV


Abstract

This paper proposes the use of time and frequency domain features from pulmonary vein electrogram recordings to analyze the spatial organization and quantify the recurrence outcome of the atrial fibrillation (AF). Intracardiac recordings obtained before and during AF ablation procedure were analyzed in order to predict the outcome of the three months after the ablation intervention in ten AF patients. Four dipoles were located along each pulmonary vein and correlation coefficients and spectral coherence between simultaneous electrograms were computed and the same analysis was applied to all the pulmonary vein recordings before isolation procedure. Such analysis was used to quantify if both temporal/frequency and spatial organization along veins before ablation is related with the termination of AF. Results showed changes in spectral characteristics with higher dispersion in spatial organization along the pulmonary veins in patients that had recurrence in the arrhythmia 0.14±0.01 vs. 0.07±0.02, in patients that maintained sinus rhythm (p<0.001). Moreover, similar results were obtained by frequency and temporal domain analysis, with with a standard deviation of the cross-correlation of 0.25±0.02 in the group of AF recurrent patients and 0.17±0.03 in the patients that maintain sinus rhythm (p <0.001). The proposed analysis could be useful for a better understanding of electrophysiological mechanisms during AF in both groups of patients, where the electrical activity collected from electrodes located in the pulmonary veins area before the isolation procedure can be very useful to predict the recurrence outcome of the AF.