Efficacy and safety of catheter ablation for atrial fibrillation in congenital heart disease - A systematic review and meta-analysis

Atrial Fibrillation Ablation in Congenital Heart Disease: Therapeutic Challenges and Future Perspectives

The increasing prevalence of atrial fibrillation (AF) in adults with congenital heart disease raises significant questions regarding its management. The unique underlying anatomic and physiological background further adds to the difficulty in eliminating the AF burden in these patients. Herein, we provide an overview of the current knowledge on the pathophysiology and risk factors for AF in adult congenital heart disease, with a special focus on the existing challenges in AF ablation. Emerging imaging modalities and ablation techniques might have a role to play. Evidence regarding the safety and efficacy of AF ablation in adult congenital heart disease is summarized, especially for patients with an atrial septal defect, Ebstein anomaly of the tricuspid valve, tetralogy of Fallot, and Fontan circulation. Finally, any remaining gaps in knowledge and potential areas of future research are highlighted.

Arrhythmias in Patients with Congenital Heart Disease: An Ongoing Morbidity

With the aging of congenital heart disease (CHD) patients, the burden of arrhythmias is expanding. Atrial arrhythmias, especially intra-atrial reentrant tachycardia and atrial fibrillation, are the most prevalent forms of arrhythmia. Managing comorbidities, such as obesity, using pharmacotherapy, including antiarrhythmics and anticoagulants, and ablation therapy has become the cornerstone of arrhythmia management. Ventricular tachycardias are also not rare; however, except for tetralogy of Fallot patients, recommendations for the use of implantable cardioverter defibrillators for primary prevention in other CHD patients are still not well established. Patients with CHD might also present with atrioventricular blockages because of their anatomy or following a surgical procedure. The scope of this article is to review the current knowledge and discuss the future directions regarding arrhythmia management in CHD patients.

Catheter Ablation in Adult Congenital Heart Disease on uninterrupted oral anticoagulation: Is it safe? - Data from a large single center study

BACKGROUND

Catheter ablation in adult congenital heart disease (ACHD) patients is a critical treatment strategy for complex arrhythmias including atrial fibrillation (AF) and atrial tachycardia (AT). In addition to vitamin K antagonists (VKA), direct oral anticoagulants (DOACs) are increasingly used in this patient population.

OBJECTIVE

The study assessed the safety of catheter ablation in ACHD patients on uninterrupted oral anticoagulation with VKA or DOAC examining thromboembolic, bleeding or vascular access complications.

METHODS

Retrospective analysis of 234 ACHD patients with simple (n=83), moderate (n=66) or complex (n=85) CHD (mean age 46 years) undergoing 368 ablation procedures on uninterrupted oral anticoagulation with VKA (45.4%) or DOAC (54.6 %) was undertaken. Arrhythmias were AF (n=97, right AT (n=181), left AT (n=65) or a combination of AF and AT (n=25).

RESULTS

No thromboembolic complications occurred. There were major complications in 4 patients (1.1%; VKA n=1, DOAC n=3) including retroperitoneal hematoma (n=2) and AV fistula requiring surgical treatment (n=2). Minor bleeding or vascular access complications occurred in 46 cases (12.5%) including hematomas >5cm (n=26), AV fistulas (not requiring surgical intervention) (n=13) or pseudoaneurysms (n=7; thrombin injection in 3/7). Overall, no significant difference was found between the DOAC (14.9%) and the VKA group (12. 0%; p=0.411).

CONCLUSION

Catheter ablation in ACHD patients on uninterrupted oral anticoagulation with VKA or DOAC is feasible and safe. No thromboembolic events occurred, and major bleeding or vascular access complications were rare. No significant difference regarding minor bleeding or vascular access complications between patients on DOAC or VKA were found.

Tachykarde Rhythmusstörungen bei EMAH – Aspekte der katheterinterventionellen Therapie

Tachykarde Rhythmusstörungen bei Erwachsenen mit angeborenem Herzfehler (EMAH) haben großen Einfluss auf Morbidität und Letalität dieser Patientengruppe. Sie basieren in der Mehrzahl auf erworbenen Substraten, die eine typische Langzeitfolge des angeborenen Herzfehlers (AHF) insbesondere nach herzchirurgischen Eingriffen darstellen. Antiarrhythmika können akut effektiv eingesetzt werden, sind aber als langfristige Behandlungsstrategie meist wenig verlässlich zur Unterdrückung von Tachykardierezidiven. Zusätzlich können Kontraindikationen bestehen bei eingeschränkter Ventrikelfunktion, hämodynamischen Rest-Fehlbelastungen, bradykardem Grundrhythmus sowie Arzneimittelnebenwirkungen. Vor diesem Hintergrund hat sich die katheterinterventionelle Ablationsbehandlung in den beiden letzten Jahrzehnten als Therapie der Wahl für die Mehrheit der Tachykardieformen bei EMAH mit zunehmend hohen Erfolgs- und niedrigen Komplikationsquoten etabliert.

AFibNet: an implementation of atrial fibrillation detection with convolutional neural network

Background

Generalization model capacity of deep learning (DL) approach for atrial fibrillation (AF) detection remains lacking. It can be seen from previous researches, the DL model formation used only a single frequency sampling of the specific device. Besides, each electrocardiogram (ECG) acquisition dataset produces a different length and sampling frequency to ensure sufficient precision of the R–R intervals to determine the heart rate variability (HRV). An accurate HRV is the gold standard for predicting the AF condition; therefore, a current challenge is to determine whether a DL approach can be used to analyze raw ECG data in a broad range of devices. This paper demonstrates powerful results for end-to-end implementation of AF detection based on a convolutional neural network (AFibNet). The method used a single learning system without considering the variety of signal lengths and frequency samplings. For implementation, the AFibNet is processed with a computational cloud-based DL approach. This study utilized a one-dimension convolutional neural networks (1D-CNNs) model for 11,842 subjects. It was trained and validated with 8232 records based on three datasets and tested with 3610 records based on eight datasets. The predicted results, when compared with the diagnosis results indicated by human practitioners, showed a 99.80% accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity.

Result

Meanwhile, when tested using unseen data, the AF detection reaches 98.94% accuracy, 98.97% sensitivity, and 98.97% specificity at a sample period of 0.02 seconds using the DL Cloud System. To improve the confidence of the AFibNet model, it also validated with 18 arrhythmias condition defined as Non-AF-class. Thus, the data is increased from 11,842 to 26,349 instances for three-class, i.e., Normal sinus (N), AF and Non-AF. The result found 96.36% accuracy, 93.65% sensitivity, and 96.92% specificity.

Conclusion

These findings demonstrate that the proposed approach can use unknown data to derive feature maps and reliably detect the AF periods. We have found that our cloud-DL system is suitable for practical deployment

Outcomes of Atrial Arrhythmia Surgery in Patients With Congenital Heart Disease: A Systematic Review

Background The improved life expectancy of patients with congenital heart disease is often accompanied by the development of atrial tachyarrhythmias. Similarly, the number of patients requiring redo operations is expected to continue to rise as these patients are aging. Consequently, the role of arrhythmia surgery in the treatment of atrial arrhythmias is likely to become more important in this population. Although atrial arrhythmia surgery is a well-established part of Fontan conversion procedures, evidence-based recommendations for arrhythmia surgery for macroreentrant atrial tachycardia and atrial fibrillation in other patients with congenital heart disease are still lacking. Methods and Results Twenty-eight studies were included in this systematic review. The median reported arrhythmia recurrence was 13% (interquartile range, 4%-26%) during follow-up ranging from 3 months to 15.2 years. A large variation in surgical techniques was observed. Based on the acquired data, biatrial lesions are more effective in the treatment of atrial fibrillation than exclusive right-sided lesions. Right-sided lesions may be more appropriate in the treatment of macroreentrant atrial tachycardia; evidence for the superiority of additional left-sided lesions is lacking. There are not enough data to support the use of exclusive left-sided lesions. Theoretically, prophylactic atrial arrhythmia surgery may be beneficial in this population, but evidence is currently limited. Conclusions To be able to provide recommendations for arrhythmia surgery in patients with congenital heart disease, future studies should report outcomes according to the type of preoperative arrhythmia, underlying congenital heart disease, lesion set, and energy source. This is essential for determining which surgical techniques should ideally be applied under which circumstances.