Patent ID: 7043292

Claim:
A method of presenting concurrent information about the electrical and mechanical activity of the heart using non-invasively obtained electrical and mechanical cardiac activity data from the chest or thorax of a patient comprising the steps of: placing at least three active concentric ring Laplacian ECG sensors at locations on the chest or thorax of the patient, each sensor having at least one outer ring element and an inner solid circle element; placing at least one ultrasonic sensor on the thorax where there is no underlying bone structure, only tissue, and utilizing available ultrasound technology to produce two or three-dimensional displays of the moving surface of the heart and making direct measurements of the exact sites of the sensors on the chest surface to determine the position and distance from the center of each sensor to the heart along a line orthogonal to the plane of the sensor and create a virtual heart surface; updating the measurements at a rate to show the movement of the heart's surface; monitoring at each ultrasonic sensor site and each Laplacian ECG sensor site the position and movement of the heart and the passage of depolarization wave-fronts in the vicinity; treating those depolarization wave-fronts as moving dipoles at those sites to create images of their movement on the image of the beating heart's surface; and, displaying the heart's electrical activity on the dynamically changing image of the heart's surface with the goal to display an approximation of the activation sequence on the beating virtual surface of the heart.