Electrical pulses help make your heart beat, and if you suffer from an irregular heart beat, it could take doctors a long time to find the source of the problem, but a new procedure offered locally can get to the heart of the problem in less time, with more precision and less radiation. It’s a new 3-D mapping system called Localisa.
Electrical conduction keeps your heart pumping in a certain sequences, much like a spark plug distributor on an old car.
Dennis Holloway is with Cardiovascular Services at Bay Medical Center and says, "It has a timing order in order to run smoothly, run great and last a long time. If your timing order is out of sequence, your car is going to run rough and you're going to have some trouble with it. It’s the same thing with your heart. If it's not going in its appropriate sequence you're going to have some problems."
An irregular heart beat can deteriorate your quality of life, making you feel very tired and weak. With this new 3-D mapping system at Bay Medical the cardiologist can pinpoint the problem in less time and with less radiation, according to Holloway.
"You can see a 3-D version using the localisa, using multiple catheters, so they're going to go up through the veins system of your body, then into the atriums and so forth to do the mapping and locate where the problem lies.
Doctors say the problem usually lies in the so called pathway where blood travels through the body. Once the pathway is identified then they can go further and do the ablations in order to try to fix this.
“So they're going to ablate the pathway using radio frequency to burn or ablate across the pathway to fix it so that we can get you back to a normal rhythm and your quality of life will improve and you can go about your daily business.”
By using more catheters simultaneously, doctors can identify the problem and fix it, all in one procedure. That means less time and money.
If you'd like more information about Localisa, you can go to www.medtronic.com.
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