Detection of electrical drivers during atrial fibrillation through automatic processing of intracardiac electrograms acquired with Cartofinder©

Arrhythmias are among the most common heart conditions in the Western population. Atrial fibrillation is the most common arrhythmia in the general population, its prevalence tends to increase with increasing age, and it is often associated with symptoms that can disable.In atrial fibrillation, the electrical activity of the atria is completely disorganized and does not correspond to effective mechanical. This thesis aims to study one of the most advanced theories for explaining the mechanisms that sustain atrial fibrillation, the rotor theory, using intracardiac signals acquired from the electroanatomic mapping system used during the ablation procedures to which some patients with atrial fibrillation undergo.Specifically, the data used were extracted from Biosense Webster's Carto3 system. Three activation site of the CARTOFINDER were analysed, two of those do not contain any rotors, while in the other one 13 rotational activity were detected. Unipolar EGM, ECG in V5 and spatial coordinates of the catheter were exported from Carto3 data and given in input to an alghorithm built to detect the presence of rotors. The alghortihm analayse the phase of the unipolar intracardiac signal, in particular it detects the Phase Singularities and their persistence in time and space. The output of the alghorithm is then compared to the data found by the CARTOFINDER to evaluate the effectiveness of the alghorithm. The alghorithm shows rotational activity of very short duration (0.15s), those activation could be considered neglectable. Analyzing the data that contains rotors, the alghorithm found a rotational activity of duration equal to the sum of all the duration of the rotors found by CARTOFINDER.Due to the lack of data with rotational activity found by the CARTOFINDER it's not possible to guarantee the effectiveness of the alghorithm. This work can be considered as promotor of future works with the aims to better understand the functioning of rotors and develop more function