BackgroundMyocarditis is a condition that can have severe adverse outcomes and lead to sudden cardiac death if remaining undetected. This study tested the capability of cardiac magnetic field mapping to detect patients with clinically suspected myocarditis. This could open up the way for rapid, non-invasive, and cost-effective screening of suspected cases before a gold standard assessment via endomyocardial biopsy.MethodsHistorical cardiac magnetic field maps (n = 97) and data from a state-of-the-art magnetocardiography device (n = 30) were analyzed using the Kullback–Leibler entropy (KLE) for dimensionality reduction and topological quantification. Linear discriminant analysis was used to discern between patients with ongoing myocarditis and healthy controls.ResultsThe STT segment of a magnetocardiogram, i.e., the section between the end of the S wave and the end of the T wave, was best suited to discern both groups. Using a 250-ms excerpt from the onset of the STT segment gave a reliable classification between the myocarditis and control group for both historic data (sensitivity: 0.83, specificity: 0.85, accuracy: 0.84) and recent data (sensitivity: 0.69, specificity: 0.88, accuracy: 0.80) using the KLE to quantify the topology of the cardiac magnetic field map.ConclusionThe implementation based on KLE can reliably distinguish between clinically suspected myocarditis patients and healthy controls. We implemented an automatized feature selection based on LDA to replace the observer-dependent manual thresholding in previous studies.
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