[Study on Effect of 4 Different Conduction Pathways on Initiation and Maintenance of Atrial Fibrillation Based on...

In this study,computational modelling was used to study whether different conduction pathways have impact on the AF initiation and maintenance based on a human atrial model.

MRI images from one patient who has atrial fibrillation were used to reconstruct the human atrial anatomical model.The number of MRI images was 112.In order to study the effect of different conduction pathways to AF,4 different atrial models were generated in this study,which were biatrial conduction via only LFO;biatrial conduction via only CS;biatrial conduction via both LFO and CS;model without biatrial conduction.

In the case of biatrial conduction simulation via only LFO,the same re-entries were induced as in the LFO and CS case.But for the two cases of only CS conduction and both LFO and CS cannot conduct electricity,one stimulus site induced unsustained re-entry which only lasted for 2 cycles,and then terminated.The other two sites induced the same re-entries as in the previously described two cases,which were biatrial conduction simulation via both LFO and CS and only LFO.

Our simulation showed that these conduction pathways played a minor role in the re-entry initiation and maintenance,the possible explanation is that all the re-entries induced in our simulation is local drivers and maintained by fibrosis.