Going around phase defects: Addressing a fundamental flaw of phase singularity detection.

Extended phase mapping explicitly detecting phase defects improves identification of rotational drivers in cardiac arrhythmias across simulated, experimental, and clinical data.

• Why it matters: Conventional phase mapping assumes continuous phase maps, causing false positives and negatives in regions with conduction block, fibrosis, or boundaries, which hampers accurate arrhythmia analysis.
• What they did: The authors developed extended phase mapping that detects and accounts for phase defects, applying it to simulated excitation patterns, rat ventricular fibrillation data, and clinical atrial tachycardia maps, totaling three datasets.
• The result: This approach eliminates erroneous detections and uncovers previously missed rotations, enabling a more physiologically consistent characterization of cardiac rotational dynamics, including reentries.