Clinical consensus on the standardized regionalization of the atria
While a standardized regionalization of the left ventricle was established in 2002 through the widely adopted 17-segments AHA model, a comparable standard for the atria has been lacking – until now. In this work, we present a 15-segments bi-atrial model based on anatomical, electrophysiological and clinical considerations.
Originally conceived by Patricia Martinez and implemented by Christian Goetz as a Master's thesis, the project was further developed through the interdisciplinary expertise of the PersonalizeAF consortium. In collaboration with cardiologists, cardiac electrophysiologists, cardiovascular imaging specialists, anatomists and experts in computational cardiac modeling, we developed a standardized regionalization of the atria, that evolved into a clinical consensus statement endorsed by the European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA) and the European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging (EACVI) of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC)."
Enabling consistent regional analyses and data acquisition between different centers and modalities, such as 3D imaging, electroanatomical mapping and computational modeling, this work may have a significant impact on atrial arrhythmia research and personalized treatment approaches.
Our implementation to automatically divide computational atrial meshes into these consensus regions is already openly available: https://gitlab.kit.edu/kit/ibt-public/divaid
Further improvements as well as technical details and evaluation results will be coming soon in a dedicated paper.