At Kitware, we provide collaborative research, development and technology integration services for companies and researchers in the medical field. This blog post features our collaboration with Dr. Geoffrey Lee and The Royal Melbourne Hospital to develop a novel heart electrical activity mapping and visualization application.

Dr. Geoff Lee

Dr Geoff Lee is a Cardiologist and Electrophysiologist with a joint appointment in the Department of Cardiology at Melbourne Health and the Department of Medicine at the University of Melbourne. He specializes in complex mapping and AF and VT ablation, and is known to have described the first epicardial rotor in man. His current research focuses on 3D mapping and visualization of persistent atrial fibrillation.

Why Dr. Lee came to Kitware?

Dr. Lee wanted to leverage our visualization capabilities to develop a heart mapping application as a research tool for arrhythmia research. This application needed to visualise electrical activity on the surface of the heart recorded from data collected from a multipolar catheter placed inside the heart. This would allow researchers, for the first time, to understand complex cardiac arrhythmias in the context of the patient’s own 3D cardiac anatomy.

Heart Map application

Kitware partnered with the Royal Melbourne Hospital Cardiology department to develop a custom solution based on The Visualization Toolkit (VTK) that provides targeted features towards mapping electrical activity on the heart surface.

This desktop application allows the researcher to import heart mesh data acquired using Computed Tomography scans of the heart chambers along with electrode locations over time. The application processes all temporal electrical activations recorded by the electrodes and computes a mapping between electrode locations and activation sites. Using different interpolation techniques, a smooth wavefront can be visualized traveling over time over the heart geometry. The application also accepts raw voltage and phase data from the measuring electrodes and displays an electrogram chart for a one dimensional view of the data. Visualizing voltage and phase data overlayed over three dimensional heart geometry provides an intuitive insight into the electrophysiological data.

To learn more about how we can tailor solutions to meet your research needs, please contact Kitware.