Catheter Ablation of Incisional Atrial Tachycardia

Tachycardias after atrial incisions represent frequent and serious problem. The majority of them are based on a re-entry electrical activation around a combination of anatomic and surgically created obstacles. Considering significant progress of cardiovascular surgery during the last decade along with potential large amount of open-heart procedures in the near future the number of incisional tachycardias has a tendency to increase. The aim of this work was to quantify the magnitude of the problem, characterize the tachycardias after different surgical operations and to analyze possible interventional treatment strategies. Nowadays evolution of mapping and ablation technologies may contribute to radically treatment of this type of arrhythmias while there are still a lot of issues that should be solved to improve the results of interventional treatment of incisional tachycardias.