Patent ID: 8290576

Claim:
A method for identifying the electrical activity in a heart of a mammalian body in terms of a single dipole from measurements from body surface potentials, concurrently estimating subject and measurement related conditions, comprising the steps of: a) measuring body surface potentials of a mammalian body by multiple leads via electrodes positioned on the mammalian body, thereby producing measurements of lead voltages at a given number of time points; b) providing prior values for a time course of the dipole location and of parameters reflecting the subject and measurement related conditions, wherein said parameters are the electrode positions on the mammalian body, conductivity parameters including the tissue conductivity and the decay exponent with respect to each electrode, together with said prior values for the time course of the baseline at each lead, which are collectively used as prior conditions, wherein the prior conditions are kept constant throughout an optimization process; c) providing initial values for a time course of the dipole momentum and initial values for all parameters of step 1b, said initial values being used as the starting values in the optimization process; d) providing regularizer functions for the properties of dipole momentum, dipole location, electrode positions, tissue conductivities, decay exponents and baselines, wherein said regularizer functions measure the conformance of said properties with an expectation about said properties, wherein said regularizer functions are based on said prior conditions; e) determining a lead voltage for each lead and each time point by calculating a scalar product of the estimated dipole momentum vector with a lead vector plus an estimated baseline value, wherein the lead vectors are determined by estimates of the dipole location, the positions of the electrodes, the tissue conductivities and the decay exponents; f) formulating an error function calculated using a deviation of the measured lead voltages of step 1a to the lead voltages determined in step 1e and the measurements calculated according to the regularizer functions of step 1d; g) minimizing the error function of step 1f by applying an optimization algorithm, varying the dipole momentum and optionally any values of step 1c, thereby optimizing the estimated values of said parameters of step 1b; h) repeating steps 1e to 1g until an optimization criterion is met; and i) outputting the time courses of the dipole momentum, dipole location, electrode positions, tissue conductivities, decay exponents and baselines.