The NIH/NIGMS
Center for Integrative Biomedical Computing

SCI Publications

2021


J. D. Tate, W. W. Good, N. Zemzemi, M. Boonstra, P. van Dam, D. H. Brooks, A. Narayan, R. S. MacLeod. “Uncertainty Quantification of the Effects of Segmentation Variability in ECGI,” In Functional Imaging and Modeling of the Heart, Springer International Publishing, pp. 515--522. 2021.
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-78710-3_49

ABSTRACT

Despite advances in many of the techniques used in Electrocardiographic Imaging (ECGI), uncertainty remains insufficiently quantified for many aspects of the pipeline. The effect of geometric uncertainty, particularly due to segmentation variability, may be the least explored to date. We use statistical shape modeling and uncertainty quantification (UQ) to compute the effect of segmentation variability on ECGI solutions. The shape model was made with Shapeworks from nine segmentations of the same patient and incorporated into an ECGI pipeline. We computed uncertainty of the pericardial potentials and local activation times (LATs) using polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) implemented in UncertainSCI. Uncertainty in pericardial potentials from segmentation variation mirrored areas of high variability in the shape model, near the base of the heart and the right ventricular outflow tract, and that ECGI was less sensitive to uncertainty in the posterior region of the heart. Subsequently LAT calculations could vary dramatically due to segmentation variability, with a standard deviation as high as 126ms, yet mainly in regions with low conduction velocity. Our shape modeling and UQ pipeline presented possible uncertainty in ECGI due to segmentation variability and can be used by researchers to reduce said uncertainty or mitigate its effects. The demonstrated use of statistical shape modeling and UQ can also be extended to other types of modeling pipelines.


2018


M. Cluitmans, D. H. Brooks, R. MacLeod, O. Dössel, M. S. Guillem, P. M. van Dam, J. Svehlikova, B. He, J. Sapp, L. Wang, L. Bear. “Validation and Opportunities of Electrocardiographic Imaging: From Technical Achievements to Clinical Applications,” In Frontiers in Physiology, Vol. 9, Frontiers Media SA, pp. 1305. 2018.
ISSN: 1664-042X
DOI: 10.3389/fphys.2018.01305

ABSTRACT

Electrocardiographic imaging (ECGI) reconstructs the electrical activity of the heart from a dense array of body-surface electrocardiograms and a patient-specific heart-torso geometry. Depending on how it is formulated, ECGI allows the reconstruction of the activation and recovery sequence of the heart, the origin of premature beats or tachycardia, the anchors/hotspots of re-entrant arrhythmias and other electrophysiological quantities of interest. Importantly, these quantities are directly and noninvasively reconstructed in a digitized model of the patient’s three-dimensional heart, which has led to clinical interest in ECGI’s ability to personalize diagnosis and guide therapy.
Despite considerable development over the last decades, validation of ECGI is challenging. Firstly, results depend considerably on implementation choices, which are necessary to deal with ECGI’s ill-posed character. Secondly, it is challenging to obtain (invasive) ground truth data of high quality. In this  review, we discuss the current status of ECGI validation as well as the major challenges remaining for complete adoption of ECGI in clinical practice.

Specifically, showing clinical benefit is essential for the adoption of ECGI. Such benefit may lie in patient outcome improvement, workflow improvement, or cost reduction. Future studies should focus on these aspects to achieve broad adoption of ECGI, but only after the technical challenges have been solved for that specific application/pathology. We propose ‘best’ practices for technical validation and highlight collaborative efforts recently organized in this field. Continued interaction between engineers, basic scientists and physicians remains essential to find a hybrid between technical achievements, pathological mechanisms insights, and clinical benefit, to evolve this powerful technique towards a useful role in clinical practice.


2015


K.K. Aras, W. Good, J. Tate, B.M. Burton, D.H. Brooks, J. Coll-Font, O. Doessel, W. Schulze, D. Patyogaylo, L. Wang, P. Van Dam,, R.S. MacLeod. “Experimental Data and Geometric Analysis Repository: EDGAR,” In Journal of Electrocardiology, 2015.

ABSTRACT

Introduction
The "Experimental Data and Geometric Analysis Repository", or EDGAR is an Internet-based archive of curated data that are freely distributed to the international research community for the application and validation of electrocardiographic imaging (ECGI) techniques. The EDGAR project is a collaborative effort by the Consortium for ECG Imaging (CEI, ecg-imaging.org), and focused on two specific aims. One aim is to host an online repository that provides access to a wide spectrum of data, and the second aim is to provide a standard information format for the exchange of these diverse datasets.

Methods
The EDGAR system is composed of two interrelated components: 1) a metadata model, which includes a set of descriptive parameters and information, time signals from both the cardiac source and body-surface, and extensive geometric information, including images, geometric models, and measure locations used during the data acquisition/generation; and 2) a web interface. This web interface provides efficient, search, browsing, and retrieval of data from the repository.

Results
An aggregation of experimental, clinical and simulation data from various centers is being made available through the EDGAR project including experimental data from animal studies provided by the University of Utah (USA), clinical data from multiple human subjects provided by the Charles University Hospital (Czech Republic), and computer simulation data provided by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany).

Conclusions
It is our hope that EDGAR will serve as a communal forum for sharing and distribution of cardiac electrophysiology data and geometric models for use in ECGI research.



K. Gillette, J.D. Tate, B. Kindall, P. Van Dam, E. Kholmovski, R.S. MacLeod. “Generation of Combined-Modality Tetrahedral Meshes,” In Computing in Cardiology, 2015.

ABSTRACT

Registering and combining anatomical components from different image modalities, like MRI and CT that have different tissue contrast, could result in patient-specific models that more closely represent underlying anatomical structures.

In this study, we combined a pair of CT and MRI scans of a pig thorax to make a tetrahedral mesh and compared different registration techniques including rigid, affine, thin plate spline morphing (TPSM), and iterative closest point (ICP), to  superimpose the segmented bones from the CT scan on the soft tissues segmented from the MRI. The TPSM and affine-registered bones remained close to, but not overlapping, important soft tissue.

Simulation models, including an ECG forward model and a defibrillation model, were computed on generated multi-modality meshes after TPSM and affine registration and compared to those based on the original torso mesh.


2014


B. Erem P.M. van Dam, D.H. Brooks. “Identifying model inaccuracies and solution uncertainties in noninvasive activation-based imaging of cardiac excitation using convex relaxation,” In IEEE Trans Med Imaging, Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 902--912. 2014.
DOI: 10.1109/TMI.2014.2297952
PubMed ID: 24710159
PubMed Central ID: PMC3982205

ABSTRACT

Noninvasive imaging of cardiac electrical function has begun to move towards clinical adoption. Here, we consider one common formulation of the problem, in which the goal is to estimate the spatial distribution of electrical activation times during a cardiac cycle. We address the challenge of understanding the robustness and uncertainty of solutions to this formulation. This formulation poses a nonconvex, nonlinear least squares optimization problem. We show that it can be relaxed to be convex, at the cost of some degree of physiological realism of the solution set, and that this relaxation can be used as a framework to study model inaccuracy and solution uncertainty. We present two examples, one using data from a healthy human subject and the other synthesized with the ECGSIM software package. In the first case, we consider uncertainty in the initial guess and regularization parameter. In the second case, we mimic the presence of an ischemic zone in the heart in a way which violates a model assumption. We show that the convex relaxation allows understanding of spatial distribution of parameter sensitivity in the first case, and identification of model violation in the second.


2011


B.M. Burton, J.D. Tate, B. Erem, D.J. Swenson, D.F. Wang, D.H. Brooks, P.M. van Dam, R.S. MacLeod. “A Toolkit for Forward/Inverse Problems in Electrocardiography within the SCIRun Problem Solving Environment,” In Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE Int. Conf. Engineering and Biology Society (EMBC), pp. 267--270. 2011.
DOI: 10.1109/IEMBS.2011.6090052
PubMed ID: 22254301
PubMed Central ID: PMC3337752

ABSTRACT

Computational modeling in electrocardiography often requires the examination of cardiac forward and inverse problems in order to non-invasively analyze physiological events that are otherwise inaccessible or unethical to explore. The study of these models can be performed in the open-source SCIRun problem solving environment developed at the Center for Integrative Biomedical Computing (CIBC). A new toolkit within SCIRun provides researchers with essential frameworks for constructing and manipulating electrocardiographic forward and inverse models in a highly efficient and interactive way. The toolkit contains sample networks, tutorials and documentation which direct users through SCIRun-specific approaches in the assembly and execution of these specific problems.



B. Erem, D.H. Brooks, P.M. van Dam, J.G. Stinstra, R.S. MacLeod. “Spatiotemporal Estimation of Activation Times of Fractionated ECGs on Complex Heart Surfaces,” In Proceedings of the International Coference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS), pp. 5884--5887. 2011.
DOI: 10.1109/IEMBS.2011.6091455
PubMed ID: 22255678
PubMed Central ID: PMC3345888

ABSTRACT

Identification of electrical activation or depolarization times on sparsely-sampled complex heart surfaces is of importance to clinicians and researchers in cardiac electrophysiology. We introduce a spatiotemporal approach for activation time estimation which combines prior results using spatial and temporal methods with our own progress on gradient estimation on triangulated surfaces. Results of the method applied to simulated and canine heart data suggest that improvements are possible using this novel combined approach.



B. Erem, P.M. van Dam, D.H. Brooks. “Analysis of the Criteria of Activation-Based Inverse Electrocardiography using Convex Optimization,” In Conf Proc IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc, pp. 3913–3916. 2011.
DOI: 10.1109/IEMBS.2011.6090972
PubMed ID: 22255195
PubMed Central ID: PMC3359386

ABSTRACT

In inverse electrocardiography (ECG), the problem of finding activation times on the heart noninvasively from body surface potentials is typically formulated as a nonlinear least squares optimization problem. Current solutions rely on iterative algorithms which are sensitive to the presence of local minima. As a result, improved initialization approaches for this problem have been of considerable interest. However, in experiments conducted on a subject with Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, we have observed that there may be a mismatch between favorable solutions of the optimization problem and solutions with the desired physiological characteristics. In this work, we use a method based on a convex optimization framework to explore the solution space and analyze whether the optimization criteria target their intended objective.