A novel tool for the annotation of bipolar electrograms for cardiac electrophysiology

Nowadays, some solutions based on automatic approaches to identify, characterize, and delineate abnormal potentials in post-ischemic ventricular tachycardia bipolar electrograms have been proposed in the literature. However, while a significant amount of annotated data is required for these purposes, no open annotated dataset is currently available. Furthermore, there is also a lack of freely available and open-source software to enable collaborative clinical annotation. In particular, for post-ischemic ventricular tachycardia electrograms, the presence of such tools and dataset could significantly foster the research in the field of computer-aided minimally disruptive ablation procedures. This paper proposes a tool entirely developed in MATLAB, which allows clinical experts to annotate post-ischemic ventricular bipolar electrograms by labelling them as physiological or not and delineating the abnormal potentials. The proposed interface embeds several features, beyond the annotation options, such as the electroanatomic map display, electrogram spatial localisation, the twelve surface ECG representation and QRS delineation, and several graphical facilities. In upcoming works, we aim to use the proposed graphical user interface to conduct intra- and inter-annotator studies and produce a validated and trustworthy annotated dataset to be publicly released according to the open data initiative.