Foreword

Article Outline

• Copyright

Atrial fibrillation is the most common cardiac arrhythmia seen in clinical practice. From the beginning, therapy consisted of control of ventricular rate with pharmacological agents. Even today this remains an important therapeutic goal and maneuver. Electrical cardiovision came on the scene in 1962 and represented an important advance in restoring sinus rhythm and continues to be a clinically useful tool. The next era was devoted to reducing the incidence of stroke and emboli by chronic anticoagulant therapy.

The next steps were (1) surgical restoration of sinus rhythm by the Maze procedure; and (2) ablation of atrial fibrillation by percutaneous catheter techniques, which is an on-going exciting technique that continues to develop. This is an exciting area of continued development, growth, and research. Fundamental to ablation is the development of reliable, simplified mapping techniques.

In this issue, Drs. Sra and Akhtar, widely recognized as leading experts in electrophysiology, present an excellent and comprehensive review of mapping techniques. They also discuss the limitation of the techniques that need to be overcome. It has 155 references. The Editorial Board and I are grateful to them for this excellent contribution. We also thank Drs. Morady^⁎ and Shivkumar^† for their insightful comments.

• ⁎ Fred Morady, MD, is McKay Professor of Cardiovascular Disease, Professor of Internal Medicine, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.
• † Kalyanam Shivkumar, MD, PhD, is Director, UCLA Cardiac Arrhythmia Center & EP program, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA.