Effects of Inferior Myocardial Infarction Sizes and Sites on Simulated Electrocardiograms Based on a Torso-Heart Model

Myocardial infarction (MI) is one of the major causes of death. Thus, understanding the underlying mechanisms of MI and its clinical features, especially its relationship with common electrocardiography measurements, is important. Heart modeling provides a possible method to simulate certain heart conditions. In this paper, a refined MI torso-heart model was proposed to explore the effect of inferior MI on simulated electrocardiograms. This model simulated the electrical activity of a normal heart and an inferior MI heart at three sites (basal, middle, and apical) with three MI sizes (small, moderate, and large), aiming to investigate the effect of inferior MI on the simulated electrocardiograms. Simulated body surface potential maps were compared with clinical body surface potential maps to verify the efficiency of the model. A new measure, namely, the normalized variation coefficient, was proposed for result evaluation. The results showed that the augmented unipolar left lower limb lead was the best choice for inferior MI diagnoses and it showed the most obvious electrocardiography signal differences between normal and inferior MI hearts. The simulation results corresponded well with commonly used clinical diagnostic criteria. Thus, the proposed refined MI torso-heart model provides a finite element simulation method for quantifying the effects of inferior MI on a torso-heart model-based electrocardiogram and has good potential for use in optimizing electrocardiogram detection.