Abstract
The information structure of body surface potential distributions has been analyzed according to the concepts of Karhunen-Loève transform and of information entropy. As a result of the Karhunen-Loève transform, 10 components were extracted as the effective information patterns and their accumulated contribution rate was found to be 96.0%. The first three components resembled dipolar patterns and the other seven components showed complicated patterns. From entropy analysis, the simple information amount at each lead reached the maximum at 3.41 bits on the left precordial field. The specific information amount at each lead, free from the effect of correlation with the rest of leads, showed positive values only in the limited region of the left precordial field. The information amounts of all the leads totaled 10.33 bits. Based on the results of the information amount distributions, we proposed a 30-electrode system which reduces the redundancy of the 96-electrode system. The 30-electrode system could explain 97% of the 96-channel body surface potentials.
