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Body Surface Potential Mapping

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Comprehensive Electrocardiology

1 32.1 Introduction

Body-surface potential maps (BSPMs) present the distribution of cardiac potentials on the chest surface during the cardiac cycle. They provide the spatial as well as the temporal and amplitude components of cardiac electrical activity, whereas the ECG scalar waveforms present only the time–voltage variation in a given lead point.

When an excitation wavefront spreads through atrial or ventricular heart muscle, it generates bioe1ectric currents, which distribute themselves to all conducting tissues in the body. This wavefront is a thin layer of heart muscle separating resting from excited areas. For the sake of simplicity, reference is made to the “classical” electrical model [1], according to which an excitation front is considered to be equivalent to a uniform dipole layer, where the dipole axis is everywhere orthogonal to the front; moreover, the tissue resistivity is supposed to be homogeneous. According to this model, currents arise from the anterior aspect of...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Milan, Milan, Italy

    Luigi de Ambroggi

  2. University Emergency Hospital of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

    Alexandru D. Corlan

Authors
  1. Luigi de Ambroggi
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  2. Alexandru D. Corlan
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Peter W. Macfarlane

  2. Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    A. van Oosterom

  3. Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Olle Pahlm

  4. Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, NY, USA

    Paul Kligfield

  5. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Michiel Janse

  6. St. George's, University of London, London, UK

    John Camm

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de Ambroggi, L., Corlan, A.D. (2010). Body Surface Potential Mapping. In: Macfarlane, P.W., van Oosterom, A., Pahlm, O., Kligfield, P., Janse, M., Camm, J. (eds) Comprehensive Electrocardiology. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-046-3_32

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-046-3_32

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