Motion compensation of optical mapping signals from isolated beating rat hearts

Optical mapping is a well established technique for recording monophasic action potential traces on the epicardial surface of isolated hearts. This measuring technique offers a high spatial resolution but it is sensitive towards myocardial motion. Motion artifacts occur because the mapping between a certain tissue portion sending out fluorescent light and a pixel of the photo detector changes over time. So far this problem has been addressed by suppressing the motion or ratiometric imaging. We developed a different approach to compensate the motion artifacts based on image registration. We could demonstrate how an image deformation field temporally changing with the heart motion could be determined. Using these deformation field time series for image transformation motion signals could be generated for each image pixel which were then successfully applied to remove baseline shift and compensate motion artifacts potentially leading to errors within maps of the first arrival time. The investigation was based on five different rat hearts stained with Di-4-ANEPPS.