Matthew McPheeters with Andrew Rollins and Michael Jenkins, Dept. of Biomedical Engineering
Optical Mapping of Embryonic Heart Electrophysiology
Optical Mapping is a powerful technique used to map conduction in the heart, and has recently been proven in the embryonic heart. A voltage-sensitive fluorescent dye is used to visualize changes in membrane potential. A high-speed CCD camera must be used in order to achieve good temporal sampling of the upstroke of the action potential, but also causes the fluorescent signal detected with each pixel to be small compared to background. We will post-process our image data because of the resulting low SNR. After normalizing and filtering the data, we will extract various measurements, including action potential durations, activation maps and conduction velocity vectors.