Surgical Treatment of Atrial Fibrillation

1. Foundations and Fundamentals 2. Outcome Tracking Is Critical To Success - And A Mandatory Part Of The Procedure 3. Maze Indications, Perioperative Management And Expected Success Rates 4. The Art And Science of Making Effective Maze Ablation Lines 5. Mastering The Initial Dissection: Making Ablation Easy and Safe 6. Overview Of The Right Atrial Lesion Set Of The Maze IV 7. The Vertical Atriotomy 8. The Intercaval Line 9. The Modified and Classic RAA Circuit Interruption Lines 10. Tricuspid Caval Isthmus Line 11. Overview: Left Atrial Lesion Set Of The Cox Maze IV 12. Box Pulmonary Vein Isolation 13. LAA Line and Appendage Amputation / Exclusion 14. The Mitral Valve Isthmus Line 15. Intra-Operative Testing 16. Sequencing Overview & Coronary Artery Bypass Implications 17. Sequencing Examples Using the Modified MVI CS Ablation Line Technique

Dr. Jonathan Philpott, Medical Director of the Electrophysiology Program at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, is an internationally renowned expert on the Cox Maze IV procedure, has learned it directly from its inventor Dr. Cox, and since refined his approach in several hundred procedures that he has performed. He is a leading enroller in multiple national clinical trials that have evaluated the Cox Maze IV procedure.



He is a Diplomat of The American Board of Thoracic Surgery, and a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, a member of the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation, and the Heart Rhythm Society. Dr. Christian Zemlin is the Director of the Cardiac Electrophysiology Lab at Old Dominion University.

He has done basic research on arrhythmia mechanisms and particularly atrial fibrillation for 15 years. He uses voltage-sensitive florescent probed to experimentally study cardiac activity large-scale parallel computer modeling to understand how arrhythmias are initiated and maintained. Other research interests include imaging of tissue structures using optical clearing and confocal; microscopy and the general theory of excitable media.

He has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles (in the category of Medicine), book chapters, and peer-reviewed abstracts. His work receives increased citations year over year from 2005-2014.

Dr. Zemlin is actively collaborating with Dr. Philpott on optimizing aspects of the Cox Maze IV procedure in animal experiments Dr. Ralph J. Damiano is a pioneer in the area of minimally invasive cardiac surgery. His developmental work on robotically assisted microsurgery for coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) earned him a ComputerWorld Smithsonian Award in June 1997. Damiano performed the first robotically assisted CABG procedure in North America in December 1998. He completed the first prospective clinical trial in the world on robotically assisted CABG and is the