Local activation time estimation in atrial electrograms using cross-correlation over higher-order neighbors

Atrial electrograms are often used to gain understanding on the development of atrial fibrillation (AF). Using such electrograms, cardiologists can reconstruct how the depolarization wave-front propagates across the atrium. Knowing the exact moment at which the depolarization wavefront in the tissue reaches each electrode is an important aspect of such reconstruction. A common way to determine the LAT is based on the steepest deflection (SD) of the individual electrograms. However, the SD annotates each electrogram individually and is expected to be more prone to errors compared to approaches that would employ the data from the surrounding electrodes to estimate the LAT. As electrograms from neighboring electrodes tend to have rather similar morphology up to a delay, we propose in this paper to use the cross-correlation to find the pair-wise relative delays between electrograms. Instead of only using the direct neighbors we consider the array as a graph and involve higher order neighbors as well. Using a least-squares method, the absolute LATs can then be estimated from the calculated pair-wise relative delays. Simulated and clinically recorded electrograms are used to evaluate the proposed approach. From the simulated data it follows that the proposed approach outperforms the SD approach.