On the use of the resting potential and level set methods for identifying ischemic heart disease: An inverse problem

The electrical activity in the heart is modeled by a complex, nonlinear, fully coupled system of differential equations. Several scientists have studied how this model, referred to as the bidomain model, can be modified to incorporate the effect of heart infarctions on simulated ECG (electrocardiogram) recordings.We are concerned with the associated inverse problem; how can we use ECG recordings and mathematical models to identify the position, size and shape of heart infarctions? Due to the extreme CPU efforts needed to solve the bidomain equations, this model, in its full complexity, is not well-suited for this kind of problems. In this paper we show how biological knowledge about the resting potential in the heart and level set techniques can be combined to derive a suitable stationary model, expressed in terms of an elliptic PDE, for such applications. This approach leads to a nonlinear ill-posed minimization problem, which we propose to regularize and solve with a simple iterative scheme.Finally, our theoretical findings are illuminated through a series of computer simulations for an experimental setup involving a realistic heart in torso geometry. More specifically, experiments with synthetic ECG recordings, produced by solving the bidomain model, indicate that our method manages to identify the physical characteristics of the ischemic region(s) in the heart. Furthermore, the ill-posed nature of this inverse problem is explored, i.e. several quantitative issues of our scheme are explored.