Background: Antitachycardial pacing (ATP) is a painless method for terminating ventricular tachycardias (VT) which would otherwise be treated using a painful high energy shock. However, it is well known that not each VT can be successfully terminated by ATP. Furthermore, ATP can be parametrized in several ways using scan, ramp or scan ramp approaches and can be applied in the right ventricle or in both ventricles (biventricular). In this work, we investigate the therapeutically most convenient ATP protocol based on a computer simulation using a patient individual model.
Methods: A patient individual model generated from a 3D/4D data set and a hybrid automaton was used for modeling and simulation of different VT scenarios. On the different VTs (from cycle length 288 ms up to 408 ms) different ATP approaches derived from the ADVANCE-CRT trial were applied in order to determine the effectiveness of these approaches.
Results: In this computer simulation study we were able to verify and validate the results from the ADVANCE-CRT trial. Biventricular ATP does not prove to be more effective than RV ATP but has a slight advantage in terminating fast VTs.
Conclusions: The availability of a patient individual model and knowledge about the ischemic area and the underlying mechanism of the VTs will allow the use of these models to optimize ATP management.
Keywords: anti tachycardial pacing; computational cardiology; hybrid automaton; modeling and simulation; ventricular tachycardia.