Temporal Stability of Dominant Frequency as Predictor of Atrial Fibrillation Recurrence

Abstract

Catheter ablation is one of the main therapies for restoring sinus rhythm in patients with atrial fibrillation (AF), yet AF termination ratios are far from satisfactory. The goal of this work is to study if temporal stability of dominant frequencies (DFs) of electrograms (EGMs) can be used as predictor of AF recurrence.EGMs were recorded from 29 AF patients using 64-pole basket catheters during the ablation procedure. DFs before ablation were obtained for 4-second overlapping fragments of EGM recordings with a 0.4 s shift, and their temporal stability was evaluated for short-term (between 8 and 12 s) and long-term time intervals (>5 min). Patients were classified as AF (N=15) if sinus rhythm was not maintained in a 12-month post-ablation follow-up, and AF free otherwise (N=14).Significant differences were found in the short-term analysis between AF free and AF patients for the difference between the mode value in DFs (p=0.045), as well as for the long-term analysis for the normalized average between DFs (p=0.028) and the average between DFs (p=0.043). More stable values were found for AF free patients for all statistically significant metrics.Short- and long-term temporal stability of DF values of EGM signals were found to be associated with the 12-month success rate of ablative therapies of AF patients.