Fundamentals of System Design for Cardiac Pulsed Field Ablation: Optimization of Safety, Efficacy, and Usability

The goal of a cardiac pulsed field ablation (PFA) system is to provide safe, effective, and usable therapy for the treatment of cardiac arrhythmias. Achieving this goal is a complex exercise in system design, requiring optimization of catheter, waveform, and dosing. This optimization is often iterative, as myriad design factors are balanced to achieve the goal while making use of computational modeling, bench testing, preclinical animal studies, and human clinical studies to evaluate system performance. It is important for both engineers and clinicians to understand the fundamentals of cardiac PFA system design in order to partner to continuously improve performance of this expanding ablation modality.