FORMULATION AND CLINICAL APPLICATION OF CARDIAC VECTOR HYPOTHESES IN ECG INTERPRETATION USING VECTOR PHYSICS PRINCIPLE

Dr. T. Rajini Samuel M. D.*

ABSTRACT

Electrocardiography (ECG) is one of the most important diagnostic tool in medical field. A lot of advancements had come in the ECG machine, yet the basic physics principle of ECG is not clearly understood. The concept of Einthoven triangle and the cardiac vector describing the electrical activity of the heart was first described by Einthoven even before a century but he never published a complete detailed description of the same. The attempts by various other researchers in trying to solve the relationship between Heart and Lead vector was incomplete. In electrocardiographic and vector-cardio-graphic analysis, the ECG voltage is treated as a vector and these voltages are used as vector components until Burger emphasised that voltage is a scalar quantity. He attempted to solve this problem using scalar (dot) product but he derived the dimension of cardiac vector as an imaginary physical quantity. After many decades, the complete Heart-lead vector relationship explained using cardiac vector and the Einthoven‟s equilateral triangle hypotheses was published in the year 2012 but it is not widely known to the medical professionals probably due to the mathematics involved in it. The proposed Cardiac vector hypotheses derived using scalar product of two vectors states that cardiac vector is an electrical field vector of dimension volt/metre. The aim of the current research study is to discuss in detail the basic mathematics and physics involved in the formulation of cardiac vector theory and its clinical application in ECG interpretation.

Keywords: Heart vector, Lead vector, Einthoven triangle.