Question: How does catheter ablation work?

Marta Varela answered on 8 Mar 2017:

Hi!

It is a medical procedure during which doctors put wires (catheters) into your heart and burn little bits of it!

Catheter ablation is used to treat arrhythmias, diseases in which the beating of the heart is irregular because it is no longer controlled by the heart’s natural pacemaker. In these diseases, heart cells there go rogue or form an electrical short-circuit and take over as a (bad and usually too fast) pacemaker of the heart. The idea of catheter ablation is that you try to destroy these areas, so that the normal (good) pacemaker can take over once again and the heart can beat normally.

It is very hard to find out where the bad pacemaker cells are though and how best to destroy them. This is where computer simulations can be of great help!