Cardiac mapping on ex vivo perfused porcine slaughterhouse hearts: A Langendorff perfusion protocol for epicardial mapping on isolated beating hearts

Cardiac mapping techniques, in which an electrode-array is placed directly on the surface of the heart, were developed to gain a better insight in the underlying electropathology of cardiac arrhythmias. This procedure is performed in patients undergoing cardiac surgery, but here not all relevant cardiac structures and conduction inquiries can be tested due to possible complications. Hence, to fulfill this gap, an ex vivo Langendorff perfused heart model was designed in this study. Porcine hearts were collected at an abattoir and resuscitated on this setup, after which cardiac mapping was performed. The presented method is the first to perform epicardial mapping on an isolated beating porcine slaughterhouse heart and can be used for a large variety of electrophysiology studies.
https://youtu.be/0NjSqLgVTZY Supplementary video
Biomedical Engineering