Abstract
By making use of the correlations among the potentials measured at different sites on the body surface, the number of electrodes required to reproduce the body surface potential map (BSPM) can be reduced as Lux et al. had pointed out. In the present paper, we have introduced a method in which the BSPMs are divided into several classes according to the direction of the vectorcardiogram in order to increase the accuracy in the potential estimation.
The present method was applied to the BSPMs measured from 75 subjects with various heart diseases including normal ones, and the results were compared with that in the Lux method. To evaluate the estimation error, the maximum deviation between the measured and the estimated BSPM as well as the conventional correlation coefficients and the RMS error were used. Judging from all these error estimations, the present method is superior to the Lux method. It is also shown that there was a simple relationship between the correlation coefficient and the RMS error. Furthermore, the effects of the electrode displacements on the potential estimation are investigated numerically by computer simulations.
