Basic Cardiac Electrophysiology for the Clinician 
asked by shawn on November 28, 2006 9:00 AM
Entering the 21st century, one of the major health problems in society and clinical practice concerns the electrical diseases of the heart. Future progress in electrophysiology depends on enhanced understandings of the fundamental mechanisms underpinning the heart's electrical behaviour, and the development of new clinical applications, radiopharmaceuticals and technology.This work addresses the widening intellectual gap between basic and clinical electrophysiology by focusing on practical understandings about bioelectrical phenomena, cardiac excitation, and arrhythmias. Using simple language and visual aids, this work aims to enrich the medical community with its thorough understanding of the basic principles for rational management of today's cardiac patients. The authors present new products and applications in the field of nuclear medicine in context with existing techniques and applications.For a general audience that includes clinical cardiologist, internists, cardiology fellows resident or medical students, this book presents the biophysical bases of normal and abnormal cardiac electrical excitation and propagation. By maintaining an appropriate degree of detail to maintain a comprehensive electrophysiology knowledge base, this work provides the common ground for a multi-disciplinary approach by clinical and basic investigators. As such, basic electrophysiology will play an major role in the future of clinical electrophysiology, from applications to diagnosis and therapy.
Reviews
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Jose Jalife is one of the few people who feel equally at home with both the experimental and computational aspects of cardiac electrophysiology research. He has been author or co-author of numerous well-cited papers in this area. This book not only gives a very good overview of the present state-of-the-art in cardiac electrophysiology, but also contains a lot of the findings of his group - especially on the role of nonlinear dynamics in cardiac arrhythmias. As such the title is too modest - it is not only the clinician who will benefit from reading the book, but also people involved in computational modeling of the heart. For people coming from outside physiology into this area (e.g., I come from physics), this book will be very helpful in giving them a crash course on the essentials of cardiac electrophysiology. The chapters I found especially relevant were: Chapter 4 ("Propagation through cardiac muscle") which gives a clear account of how ionic currents that move across a specified patch of membrane lead to propagation along the membrane so that the electric signal originated at one site can spread from cell to cell to induce the electrical activation of the entire heart (covers cable equations, "safety factor", anisotropic propagation, 2D and 3D propagation, etc); Chapter 6 ("Rate dependency of discontinuous propagation") which discusses the dynamics and ionic mechanisms of complex patterns of propagation (e.g., Wenckebach periodicity); Chapter 7 ("Basic mechanisms of cardiac arrhythmias") which deals with cellular mechanisms of arrhythmias and discusses in detail arrhythmias observed in clinical settings (e.g., ischemia, long QT syndrome, etc); Chapter 8 ("Spiral wave activity: a new lok at the old problem of reentry") which is really the icing on the cake. This is (at present) the only book aimed at the medical community which deals with the topic of spiral waves at such depth - and makes it clear why nonlinear dynamics is relevant to current research in cardiac arrhythmias. All in all it's a book well worth having for one's personal research reference library on cardiac electrophyiology.
reviewed by orla on November 29, 2006 8:32 AM
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The "Basic Cardiac Electrophysiology for the Clinician" book is a very affordable book, packed with information about all of the components of electrocardiology and electrophysiology. It is obviously a best buy for anyone needing information on electrophysiology.
reviewed by mullers on November 29, 2006 9:15 AM