Mapping of Ventricular Repolarization Potentials in Patients with Arrhythmogenic Right Ventricular Dysplasia: Principal Component Analysis of the ST-T Waves

Background: Nonuniform recovery of ventricular excitability has been demonstrated to facilitate the reentry circuits leading to the development of ventricular tachyarrhythmias. This can also occur in arrhythmogenic right ventricular dysplasia (ARVD). In fact, in patients with ARVD, abnormalities of ventricular repolarization are often observed on 12-lead ECGs, but their predictive value for the occurrence of malignant arrhythmias is yet to be established. Because body-surface potential mapping has been proved to be useful for the detection of heterogeneities in ventricular recovery even though they are not revealed by conventional 12-lead ECGs, we attempted to analyze repolarization potentials on the entire chest surface to find abnormalities that can be predictive of ventricular arrhythmias.

Methods And Results: Body-surface potential maps were recorded from 62 anterior and posterior thoracic leads in 22 patients affected by ARVD, 9 with episodes of sustained ventricular tachycardias (VT) and 13 without. Thirty-five healthy subjects were also studied as control subjects. The 62 chest ECGs were simultaneously recorded, digitally converted at a rate of 2000 Hz, and stored on a hard disk of a body-surface mapping computer system. In each subject, the QRST integral map was obtained by calculating at each lead point the algebraic sum of all instantaneous potentials, from the QRS onset to the T-wave end, multiplied by the sampling interval. In most ARVD patients, we observed a larger-than-normal area of negative values on the right anterior thorax. This abnormal pattern could be explained by a delayed repolarization of the right ventricle. Nevertheless, it was not related to the occurrence of VT in our patient population. To detect minor heterogeneities of ventricular repolarization, the principal component analysis was applied to the 62 ST-T waves recorded in each subject. We assumed that a low value of the first or of the first three components (components 1, 2, and 3) indicates a greater-than-normal variety of the ST-T waves, a likely expression of a more complex recovery process. The mean values of the first three components were not significantly different in ARVD patients and control subjects. Nevertheless, considering the two subsets of patients with and without VT, the values of component 1, components 1 + 2, and component 1 + 2 + 3 were significantly lower in the group of ARVD patients with VT. Values of component 1 < 69% (equal to 1 SD below the mean value for control subjects) were found in 6 of 9 VT patients and in 1 patient without VT (sensitivity, 67%; specificity, 92%). A low value of component 1 was the only variable significantly associated with the occurrence of VT.

Conclusions: Principal component analysis provides a better quantitative assessment of the complexity of repolarization than other ECG measurements. When applied to ARVD patients, principal component analysis of the ST-T waves recorded from the entire chest surface revealed abnormalities not detected by conventional ECG that can be considered indexes of arrhythmia vulnerability.