Preliminary Validation Using in vivo Measures of a Macroscopic Electrical Model of the Heart

This article describes an experimental protocol to obtain in vivo macroscopic measures of the cardiac electrical activity in a canine heart coupled with simulations done using macroscopic models of the canine myocardium. Electrical propagation simulations are conducted along with preliminary qualitative comparisons. Two different models are compared, one built from dissection and highly smoothed and one measured from Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI). We believe that validating a macroscopic model with in vivo measurements of the electrical activity should allow a future use of the model in a predictive way, for instance in radio-frequency ablation planning.