Atrial fibrillation is a major health problem in Western countries, and is associated with considerable morbidity and resource consumption. Safe and reliable surgical techniques for the termination of this arrhythmia have been developed since the time of the original Cox "maze I" procedure. Novel equipment based on radiofrequency and microwave technologies can be employed to create transmural a...

This paper proposes a context-aware decision making framework for a maze solving robot. The proposed architecture utilizes a fuzzy integral based decision making scheme to select the best behavior according to the current environmental context of the robot. The simulation results show that despite having no prior information about the arrangement of the maze, the proposed cognitive architecture...

Stand-alone surgical ablation for symptomatic atrial fibrillation (AF) is a well-recognized alternative to catheter ablation in patients who desire this technique or in whom interventional approaches are contraindicated [1]. Both approaches, surgical or interventional, ought to be performed with the highest possible success and lowest possible complication rates. In this issue of the Journal, B...

This study examined the effects of social housing manipulations on bodyweight, corticosterone levels, and performance of T-maze alternation in male CD-1 mice. Males that adopted a dominant social rank were heavier than those that adopted a subordinate social rank. Dominant males also had lower corticosterone concentrations than the subordinates. However, there was little to suggest that these p...

In the picturesque maze generation problem, we are given a rectangular black-and-white raster image and want to randomly generate a maze in which the solution path fills up the black pixels. While a simple formulation of the problem faces with NP-hardness, the proposed method generates such a maze in polynomial time by appropriately changing the formulation itself. Therefore, the algorithm itse...

I read with interest a recent article by Reston and Shuhaiber [1] where they have analysed the reported clinical outcome of maze-related surgical procedures for intractable atrial fibrillation (AF). I congratulate them for this excellent meta-analysis [1]. I would like to add a few comments. Maze procedure is an excellent example of a technique which was grabbed by an impatient scientific commu...

conclusions: catheter ablation of flutter circuit will not prevent later manifestation of af in 16% of the patients undergoing catheter ablation of the typical afl. bmi was the only independent predictor of af following catheter ablation of the typical afl. objectives; to determine long-term incidence and predictors of af after catheter ablation of typical afl. material and methods: between mar...

transcatheter ablation of atrioventricular accessory pathway is the therapy of choice in symptomatic patients. the ablation of posteroseptal accessory pathways thas some important points due to its anatomical location. catheter ablation of posteroseptal accessory pathways via left side approach is time consuming with low success rate and higher complications. we performed successful transcathet...

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common chronic arrhythmia, and its incidence and prevalence are expected to double within the forthcoming decades [1–3]. Currently, approximately 250,000 patients have AF in the Netherlands, corresponding to a prevalence of 5.5% in patients older than 55 years [4]. The vast majority of those patients can effectively be treated with pharmacological rate or rh...

approximately 25% of all oral cavity carcinomas involve the lips, and the primary management of these lesions is complete surgical resection. loss of tissue in the lips after resection is treated with a variety of techniques, depending on the extension and location of the defect. here we review highly accepted techniques of lip reconstruction and some of new trials with significant clinical res...