April 2018

An international team of researchers, led by Jan Christoph from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization and the German Center for Cardiovascular Research in Göttingen, performed a study, in which they imaged the chaotic electromechanical wave phenomena during cardiac fibrillation using high-speed fluorescence and ultrasound imaging. The findings have recently been published in Nature. The researchers demonstrate that optical mapping can be performed simultaneously with high-speed 3D ultrasound in beating and fibrillating hearts. Imaging action potential and calcium rotors and tissue strain simultaneously on the heart surface and in 3D within the ventricular muscle, they correlate rotational electrical vortex patterns or rotors on the heart surface with mechanical vortex filaments within the heart muscle. The mechanical filaments indicate the core regions of rotating contractile activity of the heart muscle during fibrillation, which like fingerprints of electrical rotors and vortex filaments in 3D, seem to describe the spatio-temporal organization of fibrillation. The findings offer novel insights into the mutual coupling between the electrical and mechanical activity of the heart during arrhythmias, and point out potential novel mapping approaches of arrhythmias using ultrasound.

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