Predicting spiral wave stability by personalized electrophysiology models

Identifying the atrial tissue that is capable of supporting sustained re-entrant spiral wave activation patterns offers a potential ablation target for atrial arrhythmias. Current strategies for identifying this substrate require the patient to be in atrial fibrillation and require a large specialized catheter or an inverse ECG vest. We propose a novel method to personalize biophysical ionic models from standard multi-electrode catheter measurements and to predict spiral wave stability using computer simulations of a tissue region. The developed method was applied to 5 clinical cases; the spiral wave stability was analyzed on a 5×5 cm2 homogeneous tissue slab and stable (2/5) and unstable self-terminating (3/5) rotors were identified.