Circulation: Arrhythmia And Electrophysiology On The Beat

Dr Paul Wang:                   Welcome to the monthly podcast, On the Beat for Circulation: Arrhythmia, and Electrophysiology. I'm Dr Paul Wang, editor in chief, with some of the key highlights for this month's issue.                                                 In our first paper, Pasquale Vergara and Associates develop a predictive risk score to assess the outcome of ventricular tachycardia ablation creating what they call the IVT score. The authors examined 16 demographics, clinical, and procedural related variables in 1,251 patients. They used a technique called survival tree analysis, which uses a recursive partitioning algorithm to find relationships among variables.                                                 They then compared the survival time and time to VT recurrence in groups derived from survival tree analysis using a log rank test. A random forest analysis was then run to extract a variable importance index and internally validate the survival tree models. They found that the left vent