Useful lessons from body surface mapping.

Useful Lessons from Body Surface Mapping. Body surface potential maps (BSMs) depict the time varying distribution of cardiac potentials on the entire surface of the torso. Hundreds of studies have shown that BSMs contain more diagnostic and prognostic information than can be elicited from the 12-lead ECG. Despite these advantages, body surface mapping has not become a routinely used clinical method. One reason is that visual examination and sophisticated analysis of BSMs do not permit inferring the sequence of excitation and repolarization in the heart with a sufficient degree of certainty and detail. These limitations can be partially overcome by implementing inverse procedures that reconstruct epicardial potentials, isochrones, and ECGs from body surface measurements. Furthermore, ongoing experimental work and simulation studies show that a great deal of information about intramural events can be elicited from measured or reconstructed epicardial potential distributions. Interpreting epicardial data in terms of deep activity requires extensive knowledge of the architecture of myocardial fibers, their anisotropic properties, and the role of rotational anisotropy in affecting propagation and the associated potential fields.