Data-driven estimation of cardiac electrical diffusivity from 12-lead ECG signals

Diagnosis and treatment of dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) is challenging due to a large variety of causes and disease stages. Computational models of cardiac electrophysiology (EP) can be used to improve the assessment and prognosis of DCM, plan therapies and predict their outcome, but require personalization. In this work, we present a data-driven approach to estimate the electrical diffusivity parameter of an EP model from standard 12-lead electrocardiograms (ECG). An efficient forward model based on a mono-domain, phenomenological Lattice-Boltzmann model of cardiac EP, and a boundary element-based mapping of potentials to the body surface is employed. The electrical diffusivity of myocardium, left ventricle and right ventricle endocardium is then estimated using polynomial regression which takes as input the QRS duration and electrical axis. After validating the forward model, we computed 9500 EP simulations on 19 different DCM patients in just under three seconds each to learn the regression model. Using this database, we quantify the intrinsic uncertainty of electrical diffusion for given ECG features and show in a leave-one-patient-out cross-validation that the regression method is able to predict myocardium diffusion within the uncertainty range. Finally, our approach is tested on the 19 cases using their clinical ECG. 84% of them could be personalized using our method, yielding mean prediction errors of 18.7ms for the QRS duration and 6.5° for the electrical axis, both values being within clinical acceptability. By providing an estimate of diffusion parameters from readily available clinical data, our data-driven approach could therefore constitute a first calibration step toward a more complete personalization of cardiac EP.