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Reflecting both the worldwide importance of AF, as well as the worldwide performance of AF ablation, this document is the result of a joint partnership between the HRS, EHRA, ECAS, the Asia Pacific Heart Rhythm Society (APHRS), and the Latin American Society of Cardiac Stimulation and Electrophysiology (Sociedad Latinoamericana de Estimulación Cardíaca y Electrofisiología [SOLAECE]). The purpose of this 2017 Consensus Statement is to provide a state-of-the-art review of the field of catheter and surgical ablation of AF and to report the findings of a writing group, convened by these five international societies. The writing group is composed of 60 experts representing 11 organizations: HRS, EHRA, ECAS, APHRS, SOLAECE, STS, ACC, American Heart Association (AHA), Canadian Heart Rhythm Society (CHRS), Japanese Heart Rhythm Society (JHRS), and Brazilian Society of Cardiac Arrhythmias (Sociedade Brasileira de Arritmias Cardíacas [SOBRAC]). Rather, the ultimate judgment regarding care of a particular patient must be made by the health care provider and the patient in light of all the circumstances presented by that patient.

Abstract Background The presence of complex fractionated atrial electrograms (CFAEs) and high dominant frequencies (DFs) during atrial fibrillation (AF) have been demonstrated to be related to AF maintenance. Therefore, sequential mapping of CFAEs and DFs have been used for target sites of AF ablation. However, such mapping strategies are valid only if the CFAEs and DFs are spatiotemporally stable during the mapping procedure. We obtained spatially stable multi-electrode recordings to assess the spatiotemporal stability of CFAEs and DFs. Methods We recorded electrical activity during AF for 10 min with a 64-electrode basket catheter (48 bipole electrode pairs) placed in the left atrium in 36 patients with AF (paroxysmal AF [PAF], n =16; persistent AF [PerAF], n =20). The spatial and temporal distribution of the CFAEs (fractionation interval <120 ms) and high DFs (>8 Hz) at 1-min intervals for 10 min were compared for each of the 48 bipoles. Results The baseline CFAEs were located at 68.5±14.0% (32.9±6.7) of the 48 bipoles; however, the high DF sites were fewer (9.6±8.6% [4.6±4.1 bipoles]). The CFAEs sites did not change significantly during the 10-min recording period (kappa statistic: 0.71±0.24); however, the high DF sites changed significantly (kappa statistic: 0.07±0.19). These spatiotemporal changes in the CFAEs and high DFs did not differ between patients with PAF and PerAF. Conclusions Regardless of the AF type, CFAEs sites, but not high DF sites, showed a high degree of spatial and temporal stability.

Introduction Previous studies have suggested that the prolonged or highly fractionated electrograms during atrial fibrillation (AF) are closely related to the reentrant driver regions. We hypothesized that exploration and ablation of these critical complex atrial fractionated electrograms (CFAE) may improve the outcome of persistent AF (PeAF) refractory to conventional PVI. Methods A total of 73 PeAF patients with residual inducibility or failed cardioversions of AF after PVI were enrolled and underwent number-of-fractionation mapping (NFM) by counting the number of fractionations in 2.5 s at each of the points using the CARTO3 (ICL mode) and EnSite (fractionation map) systems. After NFM, selective CFAE ablation (NFM-CA) targeting the sites of the upper 40% of the counted fraction number (NF40) was performed as an additional procedure for refractory PeAF. We investigated the prognosis of these patients within 24 months after the index ablation procedure and the relationship between changes in activation patterns during the ablation procedure and their prognosis. We also performed a propensity score–matched analysis comparing these patients with historical controls (HC) to identify the optimal indications for NFM-CA. Results The AF/AT free survival rate was 79.1% at 12 months and 56.7% at 24 months. Patients with AF termination or AF cycle length prolongation > 21 ms during the procedure had significantly better AF/AT-free survival rates than those without notable activation changes (87.7% vs. 69.0%, logrank p  = 0.028). After propensity-matched analysis, AF/AT-free survival showed comparable results between the two groups (1 year; NFM 72.1% vs. HC 77.1%, logrank p  = 0.649). Conclusions NFM-CA is a versatile and less invasive adjunctive procedure for patients with PVI-refractory PeAF who showed a comparable prognosis to patients with PVI-compliant PeAF. In particular, remarkable activation changes during the procedure (AFCL prolongation > 21 ms or acute termination) suggest a favorable prognosis.

Local activation waves (LAWs) detection in complex fractionated atrial electrograms (CFAEs) during catheter ablation (CA) of atrial fibrillation (AF), the commonest cardiac arrhythmia, is a complicated task due to their extreme variability and heterogeneity in amplitude and morphology. There are few published works on reliable LAWs detectors, which are efficient for regular or low fractionated bipolar electrograms (EGMs) but lack satisfactory results when CFAEs are analyzed. The aim of the present work is the development of a novel optimized method for LAWs detection in CFAEs in order to assist cardiac mapping and catheter ablation (CA) guidance. The database consists of 119 bipolar EGMs classified by AF types according to Wells’ classification. The proposed method introduces an alternative Botteron’s preprocessing technique targeting the slow and small-ampitude activations. The lower band-pass filter cut-off frequency is modified to 20 Hz, and a hyperbolic tangent function is applied over CFAEs. Detection is firstly performed through an amplitude-based threshold and an escalating cycle-length (CL) analysis. Activation time is calculated at each LAW’s barycenter. Analysis is applied in five-second overlapping segments. LAWs were manually annotated by two experts and compared with algorithm-annotated LAWs. AF types I and II showed 100% accuracy and sensitivity. AF type III showed 92.77% accuracy and 95.30% sensitivity. The results of this study highlight the efficiency of the developed method in precisely detecting LAWs in CFAEs. Hence, it could be implemented on real-time mapping devices and used during CA, providing robust detection results regardless of the fractionation degree of the analyzed recordings.

ObjectivesThe aim of this study was to describe the correlation between atrial electrogram duration map (AEDUM), spatiotemporal electrogram dispersion (STED) and low voltage areas (LVA) in patients with persistent atrial fibrillation (PsAF).BackgroundThe degree of left atrial (LA) tissue remodelling and augmented anisotropic conduction is one of the major issues related to PsAF ablation outcome.MethodsThis study enrolled consecutive patients with PsAF undergoing pulmonary vein isolation. In all patients, voltage, AEDUM and STED maps were created, and the correlation was reported between these three mapping methods.ResultsA total of 40 patients with PsAF were enrolled. The mean age was 62.2 ± 7.4 years, and males were 72.5% (n = 29). The overall bipolar voltage of the LA was 3.06 ± 1.87 mV. All patients had at least one AEDUM area (overall AEDUM area: 21.8 ± 8.2 cm2); the mean longest electrogram (EGMs) duration was 90 ± 19 ms. STED areas with < 120 ms was 46.3 ± 20.2 cm2 which covered 45 ± 22% of the LA surface. AEDUM and STED areas were most frequently reported on the roof, the anterior wall and the septum. The extension of the AEDUM areas was significantly smaller than STED areas with CL < 120 ms (21.8 ± 8.2 vs 46.3 ± 20.2; p-value < 0.0001). In 24 patients (60%), AEDUM areas was entirely included in the STED areas with CL < 120 ms. In the three (7.5%) patients with LVA, no correspondence with STED and AEDUM was noted.ConclusionAEDUM and STED maps allow to identify areas of conductive dysfunction as a possible atrial substrate even if a normal voltage is detected.

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common cardiac arrhythmia, and in response to increasing clinical demand, a variety of signals and indices have been utilized for its analysis, which include complex fractionated atrial electrograms (CFAEs). New methodologies have been developed to characterize the atrial substrate, along with straightforward classification models to discriminate between paroxysmal and persistent AF (ParAF vs. PerAF). Yet, most previous works have missed the mark for the assessment of CFAE signal quality, as well as for studying their stability over time and between different recording locations. As a consequence, an atrial substrate assessment may be unreliable or inaccurate. The objectives of this work are, on the one hand, to make use of a reduced set of nonlinear indices that have been applied to CFAEs recorded from ParAF and PerAF patients to assess intra-recording and intra-patient stability and, on the other hand, to generate a simple classification model to discriminate between them. The dominant frequency (DF), AF cycle length, sample entropy (SE), and determinism (DET) of the Recurrence Quantification Analysis are the analyzed indices, along with the coefficient of variation (CV) which is utilized to indicate the corresponding alterations. The analysis of the intra-recording stability revealed that discarding noisy or artifacted CFAE segments provoked a significant variation in the CV(%) in any segment length for the DET and SE, with deeper decreases for longer segments. The intra-patient stability provided large variations in the CV(%) for the DET and even larger for the SE at any segment length. To discern ParAF versus PerAF, correlation matrix filters and Random Forests were employed, respectively, to remove redundant information and to rank the variables by relevance, while coarse tree models were built, optimally combining high-ranked indices, and tested with leave-one-out cross-validation. The best classification performance combined the SE and DF, with an accuracy (Acc) of 88.3%, to discriminate ParAF versus PerAF, while the highest single Acc was provided by the DET, reaching 82.2%. This work has demonstrated that due to the high variability of CFAEs data averaging from one recording place or among different recording places, as is traditionally made, it may lead to an unfair oversimplification of the CFAE-based atrial substrate characterization. Furthermore, a careful selection of reduced sets of features input to simple classification models is helpful to accurately discern the CFAEs of ParAF versus PerAF.

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is currently the most common cardiac arrhythmia, with catheter ablation (CA) of the pulmonary veins (PV) being its first line therapy. Ablation of complex fractionated atrial electrograms (CFAEs) outside the PVs has demonstrated improved long-term results, but their identification requires a reliable electrogram (EGM) fractionation estimator. This study proposes a technique aimed to assist CA procedures under real-time settings. The method has been tested on three groups of recordings: Group 1 consisted of 24 highly representative EGMs, eight of each belonging to a different AF Type. Group 2 contained the entire dataset of 119 EGMs, whereas Group 3 contained 20 pseudo-real EGMs of the special Type IV AF. Coarse-grained correlation dimension (CGCD) was computed at epochs of 1 s duration, obtaining a classification accuracy of 100% in Group 1 and 84.0–85.7% in Group 2, using 10-fold cross-validation. The receiver operating characteristics (ROC) analysis for highly fractionated EGMs, showed 100% specificity and sensitivity in Group 1 and 87.5% specificity and 93.6% sensitivity in Group 2. In addition, 100% of the pseudo-real EGMs were correctly identified as Type IV AF. This method can consistently express the fractionation level of AF EGMs and provides better performance than previous works. Its ability to compute fractionation in short-time can agilely detect sudden changes of AF Types and could be used for mapping the atrial substrate, thus assisting CA procedures under real-time settings for atrial substrate modification.

Aim: This study retrospectively investigated the clinical outcomes of patients with persistent AF treated with a combined approach of pulmonary vein isolation (PVI) and complex fractionated atrial electrogram (CFAE) ablation over a follow-up period of 10 years. Methods: A total of 73 patients with persistent and long-standing persistent AF who underwent combined pulmonary vein isolation and CFAE ablation in the first procedure were included. A complete CFAE mapping of the left atrium and coronary sinus was performed with a 3D mapping system. All CFAEs defined as electrograms with continuous activity or mean cycle length detected by the system of <80 ms were excluded. Patients were controlled regularly during the first year followed by annual control. Any documented atrial tachyarrhythmia (ATA) was regarded as a recurrence. Results: After index ablation, 18 (24.7%) were free of ATAs during 10-year follow-up. The proportion of atrial flutter (AFL) was 39.7%, with six typical AFL. A mean of 2.2 ± 1.2 ablation procedures were performed in each patient. After multiple procedures, 33 (45.2%) patients were free of ATA during the follow-up. The proportion of AFL was 23.2% with no typical AFL. Older age, female sex and a longer AF history were associated with ATA recurrence. Conclusion: A high recurrence rate of ATA was observed after index procedure of pulmonary vein isolation plus CFAE ablation in patients with persistent AF. No significant difference in freedom of ATA was found between persistent and long-standing persistent AF groups beyond 1 year. The incidence of postablation AFL was particularly high, even after multiple ablations.

Atrial cycle length (CL) is an important feature for the analysis of electrogram (EGM) characteristics acquired during catheter ablation (CA) of atrial fibrillation (AF), the commonest cardiac arrhythmia. Nevertheless, a robust ACL estimator requires the precise detection of local activation waves (LAWs), which still remains a challenge. This work aims to compare the performance in (CL) estimation, especially under fractionated EGMs, of three different LAW detection methods relying on different operation strategies. The methods are based on the hyperbolic tangent (HT) function, an adaptive amplitude threshold (AAT) and a (CL) iteration (ACLI), respectively. For each method, LAW detection has been assessed with respect to manual annotations made by two experts and performance has been estimated by confusion matrix and mean and individual (CL) error calculation by EGM types of fractionation. The influence of EGM length on the individual (CL) error has been additionally considered. For the HT method, accuracy, sensitivity and precision were 92.77–100%, while for the AAT and ACLI methods they were 78.89–99.91% for all EGM types. The CL error on the HT method was lower than AAT and ACLI methods (up to 12 ms versus up to 20 ms), with the difference being more prominent in complex EGMs. The HT method also showed the lowest dependency on EGM length, presenting the lowest and least variable error values. Therefore, the HT method achieves higher performance in (CL) estimation in comparison with previous LAW detection techniques. The high robustness and precision demonstrated by this method suggest its implementation on CA mapping devices for a more successful location of ablation targets and improved results during CA procedures.

Background and purpose In expectation of better outcome of catheter ablation of atrial fibrillation (AF), several strategies of extra‐PV (pulmonary vein) substrate modification have been utilized. We assessed whether substrate modification or ablation of extra‐PV source is a predictor of complications. Methods Japanese Heart Rhythm Society requested electrophysiology centers to register the data of patients who underwent AF ablation. Results The data of 10 795 AF ablation cases (age; 63.8 ± 10.6 years) treated during 2011‐2016 were registered. Pericardial effusion (n = 105), massive bleeding (n = 108), stroke (n = 6), atrial‐esophageal fistula (n = 2), and other 114 complications occurred in 323 patients (3.0%). Univariate analysis revealed that age ≧ 65 years, female gender, heart failure, CHA2DS2‐VASc≧3, hemodialysis, deep sedation, and complex fractionated atrial electrogram (CFAE)‐guided ablation ([+] vs [−] = 4.3% vs 2.8%, P = .005) were related with the higher incidence of complications. Redo session, 3‐D imaging system ([+] vs [−]: 4.4% vs 2.9%, P = .017), and periprocedural dabigatran were related with the lower incidence of complications. None of the linear ablation of the left atrium, ganglionated plexi ablation, and superior vena cava ablation affected the incidence of complications. Multiple logistic regression analysis showed that in addition to 3‐D imaging system, age ≧ 65 years, redo session, and deep sedation, CFAE ablation was an independent predictor of the risk of complications (OR 1.78, P = .001). Specifically, implantation of a permanent pacemaker due to emerging sinus node dysfunction was frequent after CFAE ablation (CFAE [+] vs [−] = 4/1047 vs 2/9748, P < .001). Conclusions Among extra‐PV ablation strategies, CFAE‐guided ablation is a predictor of ablation‐related complications.