OBJECTIVE To study the value of epicardial mapping through the coronary venous system in patients with sustained ventricular tachycardia. DESIGN 20 consecutive patients with sustained ventricular tachycardia who were candidates for radiofrequency ablation. SETTING Electrophysiological laboratory. INTERVENTIONS Coronary venous angiography was performed with a catheter, which provided coron...

To test for an association between the results of ambulatory electrocardiographic monitoring (AEM) and programmed electrical stimulation (PES), or whether other factors better predict the results of PES, 57 patients (36 male and 21 female patients) presenting with either ventricular fibrillation (49 percent; 28/57) or sustained ventricular tachycardia (51 percent; 29/57) were studied. Each pati...

Since 1974, 24 young patients presenting with ventricular tachycardia and without clinical evidence of heart disease were evaluated and followed. Sixteen patients (67%) were symptomatic. Clinical episodes of ventricular tachycardia were sustained in 18, incessant in four, and nonsustained in two patients. The rate of tachycardia ranged from 130 to 300 beats/min (mean = 200 beats/min). Subtle ab...

A new neural network system for classification of the cardiac rhythm is presented in this paper. The system is composed of two neural network classifiers : a morphological classifier cascaded to a timing classifier. While the morphological classifier classify the P and QRS complexes into normal and/or abnormal beats, the timing classifier takes as inputs the information of the morphological cla...

The simultaneous occurrence of atrial and ventricular tachycardias, or junctional and ventricular tachycardias, has been reported previously. We report on a patient presenting with syncope and demonstrating, simultaneously, atrioventricular re-entrant tachycardia and ventricular tachycardia of left origin. A left lateral concealed pathway was responsible for the former arrhythmia, while the lat...

An accelerating ventricular tachycardia ending in fibrillation can be initiated in isolated hearts by procaine injections after the administration of epinephrine, but not in untreated hearts. The run of tachycardia consists of a supraventricular or idioventricular impulse followed by an accelerating train of premature systoles coupled to it. Fibrillation results when the train reaches a frequen...

An accelerating ventricular tachycardia ending in fibrillation can be initiated in isolated hearts by procaine injections after the administration of epinephrine, but not in untreated hearts. The run of tachycardia consists of a supraventricular or idioventricular impulse followed by an accelerating train of premature systoles coupled to it. Fibrillation results when the train reaches a frequen...

Non-reentrant focal tachycardias occur spontaneously, facilitated by catecholamine infusion, but they cannot be initiated or terminated with programmed stimulation. These tachycardias exhibit early activation before the QRS, however, do not typically show the mid-diastolic potential that is crucial for reentrant tachycardia maintenance. Electrophysiological studies are useful for distinguishing...

The efficacy of transvenous cardioversion and defibrillation for treating life threatening spontaneous ventricular arrhythmias was assessed in a study of 17 patients in a cardiac care unit. Eleven had ventricular tachycardia, five had ventricular fibrillation, and one had both. Transvenous cardioversion successfully terminated tachyarrhythmias on 42 separate occasions in ten patients. Stable el...

The susceptibility to the toxic arrhythmogenic effects of digitalis was studied in to normal dogs (group 1) and in 15 dogs with healed myocardial infarction (group 2) 26 ± 5 days after coronary artery ligation. The dose of ouabain required to cause stable digitalis-toxic ventricular tachycardia was 25% less in the group 2 dogs than in the group 1 control dogs (70 ± 21 versus 93 ± 16 J.tg/kg, pr...