Incidence of complications related to catheter ablation of atrial fibrillation and atrial flutter: a nationwide in-hospital analysis of administrative data for Germany in 2014

Figure 1. Study overview. A code marked by an asterisk indicates that all subheadings of this code are included. Detailed group definitions are provided in the Methods section and the Supplementary material online.

Figure 2. Complication rates comparing any pulmonary vein isolation and/or left atrial ablation (Groups 1–4) vs. isolated right atrial ablation (Group 5). In each panel, cases with left atrial ablation procedures are displayed by grey bars and right atrial ablations are displayed by black bars. (A–C) Upper row shows complications with significantly higher rates in left vs. right atrial ablations. (D–G) Middle row shows complications with no significant differences between left vs. right atrial ablations. (H–K) Lower row shows complications with significantly higher rates in right vs. left atrial ablations. Groups are defined as in Table 1. Complication rates are expressed as percentage per group and compared by Fisher’s exact tests.

Figure 3. Complication rates by centre ablation volume. Bars represent the cumulative incidences of complications occurring for isolated left atrial ablations and isolated right atrial ablation procedure, respectively, stratified by a centre ablation volume of ≤100 ablation procedures per year (grey bars) or >100 ablation procedures per year (black bars), respectively. The constituents of overall and major complications are provided in Tables 1 and 2. Table cell values individually blinded by the Research Data Center (RDC) for reasons of data protection (‘not assessed’) tend to underestimate the true occurrence of complications. For the aggregate presentation of data in the figure, we, therefore, inferred blinded cell values from all available data in Tables 1 and 2. Only for values not exactly inferable, we assumed a value of ‘1’ as the minimum possible count. Comparisons calculated by Fisher’s exact tests.