论文部分内容阅读
Atrial fibrillation is the most common arrhythmias in humans.It is a cause of significant morbidity and mortality, including upto 40% of strokes in patients over the age of 70 years of age.Drug therapy has not shown any significant benefit in controlling this arrhytyrnia.While percutaneous radiofrequency ablation of the left atrium has shown some benefit in curing paroxysmal atrial fibrillation, the maze procedure has remained the gold standard with greater than 90% success in freedom from atrial fibrillation at more than 10 years of followup.However, the conventional cutand-sew maze procedure is long and complex and not very popular among surgeons the world over.Cryoablation has been used to create the same lesions as the maze procedure and has shown similar success rates as the cut-andsew maze procedure.Recent work has shown that cryomaze procedure continues to have superior results with minimal morbidity and mortality in treating atrial fibrillation.Another important effect of the cryomaze procedure is the freedom of stroke.This is partly due to the successful restoratio of sinus rhythm, and partly due to the exclusion or excision of the left atrial appendage.Our work in animals has shown that it is possible to create transmural lesions epicardially on a beating heart, however it is limited by the thickness of the tissue.