Introduction

Catheter ablation has emerged as an effective therapy for atrial fibrillation (AF). In patients with paroxysmal AF, the primary technique for ablation involves wide antral isolation of the pulmonary veins (PVs).

This is based on extensive data showing that the PVs are the most important source of triggers for AF and that procedural success is directly related to the completeness of PV isolation.¹

Tell us about your medical background and how you came to work in the field of electrophysiology. What interested you about this field?

I completed my undergraduate studies and bachelor’s degree at Johns Hopkins University. I was fortunate to complete my undergraduate curriculum in three years, and therefore, entered medical school early in my home state at Louisiana State University (LSU) in New Orleans.

In recognition of Atrial Fibrillation Awareness Month, author Mellanie True Hills discusses the efforts being made toward the awareness, diagnosis, and treatment of atrial fibrillation.

In this interview we speak with Bernard Klocman, President and CEO of Emergency Medical Technologies, about their WriskWatch^™ device, which is a watch-sized device worn on the wrist to detect loss of pulse.

Tell us about the components of the WriskWatch^™ device.

Our developers actually pulled it off. The first watch was the size of a clock on your wrist, so I insisted it should look and feel like a fashionable watch that people would wear. The developers were able to put the proprietary technology consisting of piezoelectric disc, a microprocessor with software algorithms to measure pulse in an actual watch.