Department of Electrophysiology & Cardiac Pacing

Ventricular Arrhythmias Intensive Care

Quick Facts

The Ventricular Intensive Care (VIC) Unit for the intensive treatment of ventricular arrhythmias pursues the optimisation of experimental and clinical knowledge of ventricular arrhythmias, adoption of new research tools and implementation of novel therapeutic strategies, all with the aim of increasingly effective treatment of patients.

The Ventricular Intensive Care (VIC) Unit for the intensive treatment of ventricular arrhythmias was established in December 2009, after a pilot project started in 2007 because of the need to improve care for patients with heart disease with severe arrhythmias.

The extraordinary resources of modern cardiology have contributed to improve the survival of an ever increasing number of patients with potentially fatal ventricular arrhythmias.
The care of these patients requires special skills and commitment; in fact, despite the use of implantable defibrillators (which are life-saving devices) many of these patients experience frequent arrhythmic recurrences that have very serious repercussions on their physical and psychological conditions.

Transcatheter ablation is a procedure performed using special probes called electrocatheters, or, more rarely, using a surgical approach.
It has been performed in over 200 VIC patients in just three years and it is the most effective intervention to control these severe recurrent arrhythmias and to improve significantly the prognosis and quality of life of affected patients.
The ablation procedure, performed by electrophysiologists with specific experience in this field, requires the collaboration of various professionals from the areas of cardiology, cardiac surgery, and anaesthesiology, in the different stages of the patient’s treatment.
This is possible in the VIC Unit in which the multiple needs of a particularly demanding and complex clinical condition are managed by staff with different skills and roles working together.

Care of the VIC patient, in the critical phase and in the post-operative period, does not only mean specific technical skills within a dedicated environment, equipped with exclusive forms of monitoring and semi-intensive or intensive assistance.
It also, and above all, means the medical and nursing team offering special attention to the patient, with a strong focus on psychological aspects and pain control.

The VIC Unit conducts this process with the scope of increasing experimental and clinical knowledge of ventricular arrhythmias, adopting new research tools and implementing novel therapeutic strategies, all aimed at increasingly effective treatment of patients.

Research Activities

  • In addition to the intense clinical activity, the entire Department is intensively engaged in clinical and experimental research.
    There are different areas of scientific interest:

    • study of the pathophysiology of atrial fibrillation in different clinical manifestations and in different clinical contexts (valvular pathology, heart failure, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy);
    • etiopathogenetic research of cardiomyopathies, by means of an electroanatomical mapping study associated with endomyocardial biopsy for genetic, genomic and histological analysis of the analysed tissue;
    • genetic-functional correlations of neuropathies and muscular dystrophy with pathologies of heart rhythm and electrical impulse conduction;
    • evaluation of the arrhythmic substrate in the different forms of cardiopathy, by a combined endo-epicardial electroanatomical mapping study;
    • evaluation of different forms of alternative ablative energy (laser energy, cryoenergy,...) for the ablation of atrial fibrillation in both experimental (animal studies) and clinical settings;
    • study in collaboration with cardiosurgery for the ablation of idiopathic atrial fibrillation by thoracoscopy;
    • clinical evaluation of 3-dimensional intracavity navigation systems without the aid of radioscopy;
    • clinical evaluation of a robotic magnetic navigation system for the mapping and transcatheter ablation procedures of atrial and ventricular arrhythmias.
    • functional evaluation of contractile dysergia and hemodynamic correlations by non-contact mapping of the electrical activation of the left ventricle to guide re-synchronization therapy.

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