Abstract
The present work introduces a novel methodology to quantitatively assess interdependence between real atrial and ventricular activation series during atrial fibrillation (AF), which is the most common arrhythmia in clinical practice. The method is based on a nonlinear index, such as cross-sample entropy (CSE), which estimates the conditional probability to find similar patterns within both activation series. The study has been carried out on patients with paroxysmal and persistent AF in order to be applied over atrial activation series with different properties in their organization. In agreement with previous findings, results showed a statistically significant positive correlation between atrial activity organization and the synchronization between atrial and ventricular activations (R = 0.53, p < 0.01). Moreover, higher CSE values were also observed for persistent (0.759 ± 0.053) than for paroxysmal AF episodes (0.662 ± 0.091). As a consequence, CSE could be used to reveal clinically useful information in the improvement of current rate control therapies, which are mainly focused on controlling ventricular rate without paying much attention to the atrial fibrillatory process.
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