Characterization of Spatio-Temporal Cardiac Action Potential Variability at Baseline and Under β-Adrenergic Stimulation by Combined Unscented Kalman Filter and Double Greedy Dimension Reduction.

OBJECTIVE

Elevated spatio-temporal variability of human ventricular repolarization has been related to increased risk for ventricular arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death, particularly under β-adrenergic stimulation ( β-AS). This work presents a methodology for theoretical characterization of temporal and spatial repolarization variability at baseline conditions and in response to β-AS. For any measured voltage trace, the proposed methodology estimates the parameters and state variables of an underlying human ventricular action potential (AP) model by combining Double Greedy Dimension Reduction (DGDR) with automatic selection of biomarkers and the Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF). Such theoretical characterization can facilitate subsequent characterization of underlying variability mechanisms.

MATERIAL AND METHODS

Given an AP trace, initial estimates for the ionic conductances in a stochastic version of the baseline human ventricular O'Hara et al. model were obtained by DGDR. Those estimates served to initialize and update model parameter estimates by the UKF method based on formulation of an associated nonlinear state-space representation and joint estimation of model parameters and state variables. Similarly, β-AS-induced phosphorylation levels of cellular substrates were estimated by the DGDR-UKF methodology. Performance was tested by building an experimentally-calibrated population of virtual cells, from which synthetic AP traces were generated for baseline and β-AS conditions.

RESULTS

The combined DGDR-UKF methodology led to 25% reduction in the error associated with estimation of ionic current conductances at baseline conditions and phosphorylation levels under β-AS with respect to individual DGDR and UKF methods. This improvement was not at the expense of higher computational load, which was diminished by 90% with respect to the individual UKF method. Both temporal and spatial AP variability of repolarization were accurately characterized by the DGDR-UKF methodology.

CONCLUSIONS

A combined DGDR-UKF methodology is proposed for parameter and state variable estimation of human ventricular cell models from available AP traces at baseline and under β-AS. This methodology improves the estimation performance and reduces the convergence time with respect to individual DGDR and UKF methods and renders a suitable approach for computational characterization of spatio-temporal repolarization variability to be used for ascertainment of variability mechanisms and its relation to arrhythmogenesis.