Patent ID: 7233827

Claim:
An implantable cardiac stimulation device to apply pacing stimulation pulses to a heart and to sense evoked responses in response to the pacing stimulation pulses, the device comprising: at least one cardiac lead adapted for placement in electrical contact with the heart, the at least one lead comprising a plurality of electrodes that define a plurality of pacing configurations and a plurality of sensing configurations for the heart; a pulse generator to apply the stimulation pacing pulses to the heart in accordance with a selected one of the pacing configurations; a sensor control that maintains lists of potential sensing configurations for each of the pacing configurations, wherein the sensor control is operative to test each sensing configuration in the list for the selected pacing configuration and to automatically select an evoked response sensing electrode configuration from among a plurality of evoked response sensing electrode configurations based on the results of the test, and wherein the plurality of evoked response sensing electrode configurations refers to sensing as a function of electrode implantation sites of the cardiac lead; and a sensor to sense the evoked responses with the automatically selected evoked response sensing electrode configuration; wherein the sensor control includes an evoked response sensing electrode configuration evaluator that determines which one of the available evoked response sensing electrode configurations has a greatest measure of a predetermined evoked response sensing characteristic; and wherein the evaluator determines which one of the available evoked response sensing electrode configurations provides a greatest signal-to-noise ratio.