Sustained Reentry in the Left Ventricle of Fibrillating Pig Hearts

摘要: It has been proposed that ventricular fibrillation (VF) is driven by sustained reentry. However, mapping studies have not detected such “mother rotors” in large mammalian hearts. We mapped VF from three 21×12 unipolar electrode arrays 6 pigs. Two of the were adjacent to each other on left-ventricular epicardium. Electrode spacing was 2 mm. The third array consisted 21 needles (0.5-mm diameter, 12 electrodes, 1-mm spacing) inserted a row (2-mm between epicardial arrays. A total 88 5-second epochs analyzed with automatic reentry detection algorithms. Although intramural sporadically present (29 occurrences), it always short-lived mean life span 127±57 ms. 3 animals, (ie, persisting for more than few cycles) consistently present, often lasting several seconds. For epoch, we computed indices characterizing (1) relative duration two epicardia...