Patent ID: 8862213

Claim:
A computer-assisted method for quantitative characterization, comprising: preprocessing, by a computer system, a time series of an atrial fibrillation (AF) signal obtained from a patient; segmenting the time series of the AF signal into activation segments by the computer system, wherein the activation segments are sequential in the time series of the AF signal; obtaining local activation waveforms (LAW) from the activation segments that are sequential in the time series of the AF signal; determining degrees of similarity between the LAWs obtained from the time series of the AF signal, wherein the step of determining degrees of similarity between the LAWs comprises: representing each one of the LAWs by a vector based on strengths of the AF signal at a plurality of sampling points in a respective one of the LAWs; and computing a distance between vectors of a pair of LAWs obtained from the same time series of the AF signal to determine degrees of similarity between the pair of LAWs; identifying one or more critical regions in the patient's atria if the LAWs obtained from the time series of the AF signal have degrees of similarity exceeding a first threshold value; and characterizing atrial fibrillation in the patient based on the one or more critical regions identified in the patient's atria.