MAGNETOCARDIOGRAPHICALLY-GUIDED CATHETER ABLATION

After more than 30 years since the first magnetocardiographic (MCG) re cording was carried out with induction coils, MCG is now approaching t he threshold of clinical use. During the last 5 years, in fact, there has been a growing interest of clinicians in this new method which pro vides an unrivalled accuracy for noninvasive, three-dimensional locali zation of intracardiac source. An increasing number of laboratories ar e reporting data validating the use of MCG as an effective method for preoperative localization of arrhythmogenic substrates and for plannin g the best catheter ablation approach for different arrhythmogenic sub strates. In this article, available data from literature have been rev iewed. We consider the clinical use of MCG to localize arrhythmogenic substrates in patients with Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome and in pati ents with ventricular tachycardia in order to assess the state-of-the- art of the method on a large number of patients. This article also add resses some suggestions for industrial development of more compact, me dically oriented MCG equipments at reasonable cost.