Cardiac Voltage Analysis Software for Interpretation of Transmembrane Voltage Movies Obtained via the Langendorff Perfusion Setup

Abstract

Using the Langendorff perfusion setup to study and compare healthy and arrhythmic heart conditions is an increasingly common practice. This technique requires the ex-vivo perfusion of the heart, wherein cardiac tissue is injected with a voltage sensitive fluorescent dye, allowing for video analysis of electrical activity in the heart under normal and arrhythmic conditions. When conducted in this study, this technique resulted in recorded movies of cardiac tissue interpretable as 3D matrices whereby the spatial dimensions are defined by the movie resolution of 80 by 80 pixels, and the temporal dimension is based on the length of the movie in frames. The goal of this project was to further develop and investigate the efficiency of a data analysis application, CVAS (Cardiac Voltage Analysis Software), which is capable of analyzing these matrices in a user-friendly, intuitive way. This MATLAB based software is designed to be capable of creating highly modular plots, calculations, and optical maps for analysis on both paced and arrhythmic data. This task is one that would heavily benefit contemporary electrophysiological cardiology, and provide easy assessment of electrophysiological properties of the heart during normal and abnormal cardiac rhythms. By collecting new data for this software to analyze, CVAS was critiqued and improved to optimize its ease of use and interaction with researchers. Additionally, its ability to generate high quality and immediately presentable optical maps, plots, and calculations for both paced and arrhythmic data was strengthened. CVAS’s current capabilities include loading in and masking optical movie data sets, visualizing the electrical activity of the heart with fluorescence movies and action potential traces, and allowing for visualization and analysis of both paced and arrhythmic data sets through the use of action potential duration, activation time, conduction velocity, dominant frequency, and multiscale frequency maps.