[Ablation of ventricular tachycardia in thoracotomy without artificial circulation]. / Ablatsiia zheludochkovoi takhikardii v usloviiakh torakotomii bez primeneniia iskusstvennogo krovoobrashcheniia.

Seventeen patients were operated on for ventricular tachycardia (VT). Closed heart radical surgeries destroying the arrhythmia substrate were made without employing extracorporeal circulation. A VT episode was inducible in 16 (94%) patients for VT intraoperative mapping. The tachycardia substrate was removed by cryodestruction, cryoisolation or both. A special cryoprobe was introduced into the ventricular cavity by placing the purse-string suture at its apex. VT paroxysms completely disappeared in 12 (70.6%) and could be arrested by medications in 2 (11.8%). Three (17.6%) patients had recurrent VT episodes following a surgery. One (6%) patients died on day 7 of postoperation. The method proposed impairs no heart physiological activity, which facilitates inductions of an episode and its mapping during a surgery. The closed heart surgery enables the method to be applied in patients at a high risk for surgeries by employing extracorporeal circulation.

Cryosurgery in tachycardia treatment.

Cryosurgical techniques have become established and acceptable therapy in the treatment of resistant arrhythmias. In this report, both experimental and clinical data are presented describing the results of various cryosurgical techniques used at the Cardiac Rhythm Disturbance Center in Lithuania, USSR.

[Electrodes for epicardial electrical mapping]. / Elektrody dlia épikardial'nogo élektrokartografirovaniia.

Medical-technical characteristics of electrodes for epicardial mapping are examined. Most electrodes are bipolar. The differences between them lies either in the contact configuration or in the fixation mode. The dependence of biosignal amplitude and shape on the contact orientation with respect to the direction of excitation spread is described. Free from this dependence are electrodes with a central point contact and a ring contact through the periphery Clinging and screw-in electrodes are useful for long-term monitoring while stick and suction electrodes are recommended for short-term recording from multiple sites. Ring electrodes put on a finger are advantageous in hardly accessible zones.