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Atrial fibrillation is the most common cardiac arrhythmia. Many physicians believe in the hypothesis that persistent atrial fibrillation is maintained by centers of rotatory activity. These so called rotors are sometimes found by physicians during catheter ablation or electrophysiological studies but there are also physicians who claim that they did not find any rotors at all. One reason might be that today rotors are mainly identified by visual inspection of the data. Thus we are aiming at an algorithm for rotor detection. We first developed an algorithm based on the local activation times of the intracardiac electrograms recorded by a multielectrode catheter that can automatically determine the cycle length coverage. This was done to get an objective view on possible rotors and therefore help to quantify whether a rotor was found or not. The algorithm was developed and evaluated in two different simulation setups, where it could reliably determine cycle length coverage. But we found out that effects like wave collision and slow conduction have strong influence on cycle length coverage. This prevents cycle length coverage from being suited as the only parameter to quantify whether a rotor is present or not. On the other hand we could confirm that rotors imply a cycle length coverage of >70% if the multielectrode catheter is centered in an area of

The arrhythmogenic mechanisms of atrial fibrillation (AF) are still not well understood. Increased atrial fibrosis is a structural hallmark in patients with persistent AF. We assessed the electrogram signature rotational activity and their spatial relationship to low voltage areas in patients with persistent AF. Computer simulations implicating 3-dimensional atrial tissue with different amount of atrial fibrosis were used to assess development and stability of rotational activities during AF. Rotor anchoring occurred at the borderzone between fibrosis and healthy atrial tissue with 12 consecutive rotations prior to rotor extinction. Rotational activity in fibrotic tissue resulted in fractionated signals and were overlapped with large negative electrograms in unipolar recording mode from neighboring healthy tissue — impressing as a focal source. Necessary conditions for development and stability of rotational activities around fibrosis were on the one hand a minimum size of atrial fibrosis area equal or larger than 10mm × 10mm and on the other hand the degree of atrial fibrosis of 40%. Clinical data showed that AF termination sites were located within low voltage areas (displaying

Atrial fibrillation is a common irregular heart rhythm. Until today there is still a need for research to quantify typical signal characteristics of rotors, which can induce atrial fibrillation. In this work, signal characteristics of a stable and a more unstable rotor in a realistic heart model including fiber orientation were analyzed with the following methods: peak-to-peak amplitude, Hilbert phase, approximate entropy and RS-difference. In this simulation model the stable rotor rotated with a cycle length of 145 ms and stayed in an area of 1.5 mm x 3 mm. Another more unstable rotor with a cycle length of 190 ms moved in an area of 10 mm × 4 mm. In a distance of 2 mm to the rotor tip, the peak-to-peak amplitude decreased significantly, whereas the RS-difference and the approximate entropy were maximal. The rotor center trajectories were detected by phase singularity points determined by the Hilbert transform. We showed that more unstable rotors resulted in more amplitude changes over time and also the cycle length differed more. Furthermore, we presented typical activation time patterns of the Lasso catheter centered at the rotor tip and in different distances to the rotor tip. We suggest that cardiologists use a combination of the described methods to determine a rotor tip position in a more robust manner.