Dr. Nassir Marrouche, Dr. Marcos Daccarett and their colleagues will be presented the Eric N. Prystowsky Fellow Clinical Research award at the Heart Rhythm 2008 conference this weekend in San Francisco.
Marrouche's research hopes to improve the curative rates and safety of RF ablation, a procedure in which the electrical signals that cause the heart to contract at a chaotic, usually rapid, rate are mapped, localized, and then destroyed using radio frequency energy.
Earlier this year, Marrouche presented the first study to show how MRI can be used as a precise diagnostic tool to visually detect the progression and location of the atrial fibrillation.
According to a statement from the University of Utah Health Sciences, AF is a heart-rhythm disorder that affects more than 3.5 million people in the U.S., making it the country's most common cardiac malfunction, causing more than 66,000 deaths a year.
