Echocardiography, particularly transoesophageal and intracardiac modalities, plays an established and increasingly important role in managing atrial fibrillation, guiding cardioversion, and facilitating percutaneous interventions.
Supports continued echo guidance in AF; leaves open prospective outcome trials on protocol standardization.
A trial fibrillation (AF) is the most commonly encountered arrhythmia in clinical practice. ecent advances in technology and in the understanding of the pathophysiology of AF have led to more definitive and potentially curative therapeutic approaches. Because of its recognised value, echocardiography has become established in guidelines for management of AF 2 and utilisation of echocardiography has increased, particularly of transoesophageal echocardiography to guide direct current cardioversion or detect cardiac sources of embolism. Even more recently the development of intracardiac echocardiography has led to real-time guidance of percutaneous interventions, including radiofrequency ablation and left atrial appendage closure procedures for patients with AF.
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Richard W. Troughton (2003) studied this question.
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