Development of a BSP Mapping System for Clinical Application

The objective of this project is the development of a 63 channel body surface potential (BSP) mapping system for solving the electrocardiographic inverse problem for noninvasive functional cardiac electrical diagnosis. The measurement of the electric potential on the outer thorax surface using multichannel mapping systems allows, in addition to conventional signal processing in time and frequency domains, the noninvasive estimation of cardiac electrical sources (transmembrane potentials or activation time maps on the endo- and epicardium) when morphological information about the volume conductor is included. This is obtained in most cases by using magnetic resonance imaging in order to build up a boundary element thorax model for a mathematical formulation of the forward and inverse problem. The signal conditioning unit consits of the instrumentation amplifier, an isolation and output amplifier and a filtering circuit. The data acquisition unit of a Pentium 133 MHz personal computer with 16 MByte RAM and a 1GByte SCSI hard disc. A/D converting is performed by an AT-MIO-64E-3 card (National Instruments, Austin, TX, USA) with a 64 single ended or 32 differential channel configuration. The software package LabVIEW (National Instruments, Austin, TX) allows graphical programming and is used for the development of routines for data sampling and processing and for data display.