Abstract
Atrial fibrillation (AFib) is the most common arrythmia characterized by
rapid and irregular beating of the atrial chambers of the heart. Besides
medication, thermal ablation of myocardial tissue is currently the
“gold standard” of clinical treatment of AFib, which works by
destroying local myocardial tissue to isolate faulty electrical signals
causing the arrhythmia within the local area. It is usually performed by
heating local tissue with radiofrequency (RF) electrical current,
creating conduction-blocking lesions that stop AFib. However, problems
associated with RF ablation are related to thermal side effect, such as
PVI, thrombus formation, cardiac tamponade, phrenic nerve injury,
esophageal fistula, and even stroke. The recent developed ablation
modality of using IRE, appears to solve all these problems with less
procedure time. This paper highlights the significant event of the IRE
ablation in the timeline, and also compare IRE and RF ablation in safety
and efficacy.