Study Population
The present study was a prospective observational study that included 81
consecutive patients with non-paroxysmal AF who underwent catheter
ablation at our institution between November 2018 and April 2020. Five
patients were excluded due to having no multidetector computed
tomography (MDCT) images and 3 patients for undergoing additional LA
ablation other than the PVI. Finally, a total of 73 persistent and
longstanding persistent AF patients were investigated in this study.
Persistent AF was defined as AF lasting ≥7 days but <1 year,
and longstanding persistent AF as continuous AF lasting ≥1
year.17 All antiarrhythmic drugs were discontinued for
at least 5 half-lives and one patient received oral amiodarone therapy
before the catheter ablation. The protocol for this research project was
approved by a suitably constituted Ethics Committee of Tohoku Medical
and Pharmaceutical University (Date of IRB approval: February 25, 2019;
Approval number, 2018-2-104) and it conformed to the provisions of the
Declaration of Helsinki. All patients provided written informed consent
for the ablation procedure, and the use of their anonymized data in this
study.