Dynamic Modeling of Heart Dipole Vector for the ECG and VCG Generation

The electrocardiogram (ECG) is the major diagnostic instrument for the analysis of cardiac electrophysiology; this is due to two simple reasons, first because it is not invasive and secondly because an ECG is a source of accurate information about the heart functionality. For these reasons, in the last years, the ECG has attracted the interest of many scientists, who have developed algorithms and models to investigate the cardiac disorders. The aim of this paper is to introduce a novel dynamic model to simulate pathologic ECGs. We discuss a generalization of a well known model for normal ECG signals generation and we show that it can be extended to simulate the effects on ECG of some cardiac diseases. We also represent the 3D vector trajectory of the cardiac cycle by reconstructing the heart dipole vector (HDV) from the Frank lead system. Finally, we propose to generate the complete 12-lead ECG system by the HDV projection. The results shows this a powerful tool for pathologic ECG generation, future research will be devoted to set up an extensive synthetic ECG database which could open the door to new theories about the genesis of the ECG as well as new models of heart functionality.