Spatiotemporal Differentiation of Myocardial Infarctions

Myocardial infarction (MI), also known as a heart attack, is the leading cause of death in the U.S. It often occurs due to the occlusion of coronary arteries, thereby leading to insufficient blood and oxygen supply that damage cardiac muscle cells. Because blood vessels are branching throughout the heart, MI occurs at different spatial locations (e.g., anterior and inferior portions) of the heart. The spatial location of the diseased is rupts normal excitation and propagation of cardiac electrical activity in space and time. Most previous studies focused on the relationships between disease and time-domain biomarkers from 12-lead ECG signals (e.g., Q wave, QT interval, ST elevation/depression, T wave). Few, if any, previous approaches investigated how the spatial location of diseases will alter cardiac vectorcardiogram (VCG) signals in both space and time. This paper presents a novel spatiotemporal warping approach to quantify the dissimilarity of disease-altered patterns in 3-lead spatiotemporal VCG signals. The hypothesis testing shows that there are significant spatiotemporal differences between healthy control, MI-anterior, MI-anterior-septal, MI-anterior-lateral, MI-inferior, and MI-inferior-lateral. Furthermore, we optimize the embedding of each functional recording as a feature vector in the high-dimensional space that preserves the dissimilarity distance matrix. This novel spatial embedding approach facilitates the construction of classification models and yields an averaged accuracy of 95.1% for separating MIs and Healthy Controls (HCs) and an averaged accuracy of 95.8% in identifying anterior-related MIs and inferior-related MIs.