Focus on the Atrial Structure —Useful Anatomical Information for Catheter Ablation—

Catheter ablation of atrial fibrillation (AF) has been making remarkable progress for the last decade. When manipulating the catheter in the procedure, we have to reconstruct the three-dimensional cardiac structure in our heads by using two-dimensional fluoroscopic image. The author, an interventional electrophysiologist, developed and proposed a new method for recognizing the cardiac structure by using human body sections. In order to easily create practical cardiac images, the human bodies were cut sagittally, obliquely and coronally. In the sections obtained, the heart could be observed together with their surroundings within the thorax in the neutral position. The most important point is that the heart is observed without being removed from the body. This concept of the research is to recognize the heart as an object composed of many structures. It was useful for analyzing the mechanism of arrhythmia and to improve catheter technique and mapping systems.