Cardiology

Electrophysiology Department

The department of Cardiology of KEM has one of the best Electrophysiology (EP) set- up in India. Both diagnostic and therapeutic studies are performed here. To date more than 800 Radiofrequency ablations have been performed here in the last 4 years. All the ablations are performed on the state of art EP system donated to the department by the Government of Netherlands and the department of Electrophysiology, Maastricht.

The procedures consist of Radiofrequency ablation of various arrhythmias which include atrio-ventricular nodal reentrant tachycardia, WPW with overt and concealed preexcitation, Atrial tachycardia, Atrial Flutter, Idiopathic Ventricular tachycardia, Ischaemic Ventricular tachycardia , Bundle branch re-entrant tachycardia, AV nodal modualtion for atrial fibrillation and other diagnostic studies.

The work is carried out principally by two Associate Professors of the department who have received EP training abroad. The are assisted by the resident doctors of the department when they are posted in the cath.lab. The success rate for the RF ablations here is more that 90 percent with a very low morbidity and negligible mortality.

In addition to the Electrophysiology studies there are a number of pacemaker and Intracardiac defibrillators implanted here. On an average around 30 dual chamber pacemakers and 70 single chamber pacemakers are implanted .The intracardiac defibrillator implantation program has started recently and there have eight implantations in the year 1998.