background: atrial fibrillation is a common arrhythmia in patients with rheumatic mitral and other valve diseases who are candidates for valve repair surgeries. conversion of rhythm to sinus has positive effects on quality of life and lower use of medications. the aim of this clinical study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the radiofrequency ablation maze iii procedure in the treatment of a...

patients with valvular heart disease and suffering atrial fibrillation of more than 12 months duration have a low probability of remaining in sinus rhythm after valve surgery alone. we performed intra-operative radiofrequency ablation or cryoablation as an alternative to surgical maze ііі procedure to create linear lesion lines for conversion of this arrhythmia to sinus rhythm. a total of 30 pa...

Atrial Fibrillation (AF) is the most common sustained cardiac arrhythmia in clinical practice. Surgical ablation is a therapeutic procedure that creates lines of conduction block to interrupt the maintenance of AF. However, surgical AF ablation procedures are largely based on empirical considerations, and may not be optimized. In this study, based on a detailed human atrial model with fiber ori...

The Cox maze procedure developed originally in 1987 by Dr James Cox has evolved from a "cut and sew" surgical procedure, where the maze was applied using multiple surgical cuts, to an extensive use of surgical ablation technology where ablation lesions are placed with alternative energy sources (radiofrequency, cryothermy, microwave, and high-frequency ultrasound). Furthermore, the procedure ha...

OBJECTIVE Current drug treatment for atrial fibrillation is suboptimal and percutaneous catheter-based ablation techniques may be associated with complications. The aim of this study is to assess the cost-effectiveness of (1) high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU)-assisted surgical ablation, (2) the classic 'cut and sew' maze procedure and (3) percutaneous ablation, all concomitant to cardiac...

The search for alternative epicardial energy sources in the treatment of nonvalvular atrial fibrillation (AF) is a relatively new aspect of the evolving spectrum of Maze operations. We tested the hypothesis that epicardial microwave ablation produces identical results to those of the standard cryosurgical Maze. Fourteen consecutive patients with chronic AF underwent on-pump epicardial Maze proc...

[1] Phan K, Yan TD. Minimally invasive Cox-maze procedure, beating-heart epicardial ablation, hybrid procedure and catheter ablation: a call for comparative evidence. Eur J Cardiothorac Surg 2015;48:515. [2] Je HG, Shuman DJ, Ad N. A systematic review of minimally invasive surgical treatment for atrial fibrillation: a comparison of the Cox-Maze procedure, beating-heart epicardial ablation, and ...

Catheter ablation of atrial fibrillation (AF) has been shown to be effective for paroxysmal AF. However, for patients with persistent or longstanding persistent AF, the success rates for catheter ablation is low. The Cox-Maze procedure is the most effective non-pharmacological treatment of AF. However, due to the need for open-heart surgery and the morbidity associated with the surgical Cox-Maz...

s physicians bid farewell to the last century, they also itnessed the rise of catheter-based ablation and the fall of ntiarrhythmic drug use for the treatment of cardiac arhythmias. At that time, only a select few investigators truly elieved that catheter-based ablation would work for treatent of atrial fibrillation (AF). The initial attempts at catheter ablation, patterned after he Cox surgica...