All Things Afib Armin Kiankhooy, MD

Drs. Chalfoun and Banno from Corewell Health Butterworth Hospital in Grand Rapids, MI discuss their landmark paper, “Four Year Follow-up of Outcomes of the Hybrid Epicardial-Endocardial Ablation: A Single Center Experience.” This is the first paper that describes the outcomes of the Convergent procedure in combination with left atrial appendage ligation with the AtriClip and Ligament of Marshall division. This in depth conversation covers all aspect of their program inception, growth and evolution to its current state and the results of their paper.

Dr. HelenMari Merritt is a distinguished Cardiac surgeon at Methodist Physicians Clinic in Omaha, Nebraska and specializes in the treatment of atrial fibrillation. She recently moderated the much anticipated Atrial Fibrillation Session at the 60th Annual 2024 STS Meetingin San Antonio, TX where the newest STS Guidelines for the Surgical Management of Atrial Fibrillation were presented. We discuss these new guidelines and more in this episode!

Dr. Whitney Fu from the prestigious University of Michigan is the principal author of an outstanding paper recently published in JTCVS entitled, “Postoperative atrial fibrillation in mitral valve surgery is not benign.” We discuss the important findings of this very revealing paper and shed some light on the often under-appreciated entity of POAF and its detrimental effects on post-MVR patient outcomes.

Dr. Hunter Mehaffey is an outstanding Cardiac Surgeon and Clinical Researcher at the West Virginia University. He recently presented at the AATS 2023 meeting and published in JTCVS a large Medicare analysis of over 100,000 cardiac surgery patients with pre-existing AF in attempts to answer the question if surgical ablation confers additional clinical advantage over LAAO alone. This is definitely worth a listen!

Dr. Charles Willekes and I discuss his recently reported randomized control study evaluating the safety and effectiveness of prophylactic bilateral pulmonary vein isolation in preventing post-operative atrial fibrillation. We also discuss our recent prophylactic posterior wall isolation technique to prevent POAF. Lots of new and intriguing data on this episode !!!

Ali Syed is a brave medical student who not only is at the forefront of Hybrid Ablation approaches as a member of the Medical College of Wisconsin’s Robotic Enhanced Convergent Plus team but also a #DEI advocate who shares his insight on the STS 2023 Presidential address.