For a second year in a row, 4th year PhD student Lukas Rantner’s abstract submitted to the Heart Rhythm Scientific Sessions was chosen to be presented at the meeting’s featured poster session. Heart Rhythm (about 13 thousand participants) accepts only about 30% of submitted abstracts, and only the top 1% are chosen for the featured poster session.

The abstract citation is: Rantner LJ, Tice BM, Trayanova NA. Virtual electrode-induced earlier propagation is responsible for terminating ventricular tachycardia after low voltage field stimuli. Heart Rhythm. 2011 May;8(5):S. In Press.

“We showed that the termination of ventricular tachycardia (VT), i.e. cardioversion, was possible with multiple low-voltage monophasic stimuli, even for shock strengths below the diastolic activation threshold. The mechanisms for low-voltage cardioversion were that so-called virtual electrodes were created in the grooves between trabeculations (small endocardial structures) by the low-voltage stimuli. These virtual electrodes sped up propagation which made the reentrant wavefront reach its own refractory tail, thereby terminating arrhythmia because no further excitable tissue was available for the wavefront to excite.”

Congratulations to Lukas for his good work!