Background Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a chronic and progressive disease, and if uncontrolled results in permanent remodeling of the myocardium. Reverse remodeling of the left atrium (LA) after the successful pulmonary vein isolation (PVI) in recurrent/chronic AF may occur, however, mitral regurgitation (MR) recovery after the successful PVI has not been demonstrated but would be an important f...

Introduction Pulmonary vein isolation (PVI) is the standard treatment option in interventional electrophysiological therapy of atrial fibrillation. Three-dimensional (3D) mapping systems are commonly employed to guide PVI procedures. This report demonstrates how 3D mapping systems may be applied beyond their standard use to facilitate transseptal puncture and PVI in a case of challenging cardia...

BACKGROUND In patients receiving an infusion of norepinephrine, the relationship between the amplitude of the oximeter plethysmographic waveform and stroke volume may be variable and quality of the waveform might be reduced, compared with patients not receiving norepinephrine. We assessed the reliability of the pleth variability index (PVI), an automatic measurement of the respiratory variation...

BACKGROUND There has been growing concern that linear ablation is associated with an increased risk of iatrogenic arrhythmias in patients undergoing ablation for atrial fibrillation (AF). Therefore, we compared circumferential pulmonary vein ablation plus left atrial linear ablation (CPVA+LALA) with segmental pulmonary vein isolation (PVI)in patients with paroxysmal AF. METHODS AND RESULTS Si...

BACKGROUND The pleth variability index (PVI), which is calculated from respiratory variations in the perfusion index (PI), has been shown to predict fluid responsiveness in mechanically ventilated patients; however, vasomotor tone changes induced by hypercapnia can affect PI and hence may slim down the accuracy of PVI. This study was designed to find out the impact of mild hypercapnia on PVI. ...

BACKGROUND The incidence of silent cerebral lesions (SCL) after atrial fibrillation (AF) ablation is highly variable, depending on the technology used. Recently, an increased risk for SCL has been described for a novel, nonirrigated ablation tool using multielectrode phased radiofrequency (PVAC). The aim of this prospective study was to evaluate the incidence and long-term follow-up of SCL in p...

Introduction Left atrial appendage occlusion (LAAO) with the Watchman device (Boston Scientific, Natick, MA) is frequently performed as a nonpharmacologic, second-line therapy for stroke prevention in patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) and contraindications to long-term anticoagulation. Although combined catheter pulmonary vein isolation (PVI) and Watchman procedures may be performed succes...

In this paper, we introduce a probabilistic version of the wellstudied Value-Iteration approach, i.e. Probabilistic Value-Iteration (PVI). The PVI approach can handle continuous states and actions in an episodic Reinforcement Learning (RL) setting, while using Gaussian Processes to model the state uncertainties. We further show, how the approach can be efficiently realized making it suitable fo...

INTRODUCTION The advent of electroanatomical mapping (EAM) systems for pulmonary vein isolation (PVI) has dramatically decreased radiation exposure. However, the need for some fluoroscopy remains for obtaining left atrial (LA) access. The aim was to test the feasibility of fluoroscopy-free PVI in patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) and a patent foramen ovale (PFO) guided solely by an EAM sys...

Variational inference is a powerful approach for approximate posterior inference. However, it is sensitive to initialization and can be subject to poor local optima. In this paper, we develop proximity variational inference (pvi). pvi is a new method for optimizing the variational objective that constrains subsequent iterates of the variational parameters to robustify the optimization path. Con...