Heart tissue viability monitoring in vivo by using combined fluorescence, thermography and electrical activity measurements

Abstract

A prototype system for in vivo monitoring of the heart tissue viability by using combined measurements of fluorescence, thermography and electrical activity has been elaborated for cardiac surgery. The fluorescence imaging of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide NAD(P)H in the blue light range (λ=467 nm) by using UV light (λ=347 nm) excitation was used to detect metabolic disturbances. The method of the principal component analysis was used for the processing of the fluorescence image sequences. Far infrared (λ=7.5-13 μm) imaging was used to evaluate temperature dynamics of the tissue surface during circulation disturbances. Evaluation of the epicardial electrogram shape by using continuous wavelet transform was used to detect and evaluate ischemia-caused disturbances of the electrical activity of the tissue. The combination of temperature, fluorescence and electrical activity estimates obtained from synchronically registered parameters during the experiments on model systems and experimental animals yielded qualitatively new results for the evaluation of cardiac tissue viability and enabled to achieve a versatile evaluation of the heart tissue viability.