Cardiac catheter ablation was developed by Mel Scheinman and UCSF's Electrophysiology team in the 1970's and 80's. The first-ever catheter ablation on a human was performed at UCSF in 1981.
Today, more than 20,000 cardiac catheter ablations are performed each year in the United States. UCSF performs more than 1,200 electrophysiology procedures annually.
UCSF's Electrophysiology team successfully cures 95 to 98 percent of the arrhythmias from the upper chambers of the heart, called supraventricular tachycardia, and certain arrhythmias from the lower chambers of the heart, called ventricular tachycardia. The national average is 90 percent.
UCSF electrophysiologists were among the first in the world to implant biventricular pacemakers to treat patients with congestive heart failure. We continue to provide advanced heart failure therapies and to develop new approaches to resynchronization through ongoing research.
The Electrophysiology Service was one of the first centers in the United States to use resynchronization therapy (biventricular pacing) for the treatment of heart failure and performed much of the early research in this area.
UCSF electrophysiologists have been pioneers in the assessment of the heart's electrical functions, studying arrhythmias under controlled conditions with electrophysiology (EP) studies.
The Cardiac Electrophysiology and Arrhythmia Service, headed by Dr. Jeffrey Olgin, has a long-standing interest in atrial arrhythmias, including atrial fibrillation and atrial flutter. This group has defined the mechanism of common atrial flutter, as well as complex atrial flutter patterns including double wave, lower loop and upper loop reentry.
More recently, Olgin's team has described patients with left atrial septal flutter, and pioneered new techniques for mapping and ablation of complex atrial tachycardia and flutter circuits.
UCSF develops and participates in clinical trials with the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration and pharmaceutical and device companies to discover better treatments for patients with heart arrhythmias. Dr. Olgin has several NIH funded projects in the basic science arena to understand the causes of and to develop novel treatments for atrial fibrillation. The group has several ongoing research trials to develop novel mapping and ablation approaches to cure atrial fibrillation, to study the genetic basis of atrial fibrillation and to study potential ways to prevent atrial fibrillation.
