Cardiac Mapping: Approach and Troubleshooting for the Electrophysiologist

Cardiac electrophysiology has rapidly grown as an interventional therapeutic modality for an increasing number of patients and arrhythmia disorders. A major reason for these advances has been the availability and use of cardiac mapping systems. The practicing electrophysiologist, however,necessarily needs a thorough understanding of appropriate collection of data points to have a result that is anatomically and physiologically meaningful. To properly utilize available mapping systems, not only does the interventional electrophysiologist need to be cognizant of the inherent limitations of these symptoms but must be certain that the raw material being fed into the system (electrograms, annotation, anatomic points, registration, etc.) are meticulously obtained and accurate. In this chapter, we review the techniques for collecting these data points and present an algorithm to troubleshoot common errors resulting from inappropriate data collection. This edition first published 2013