Victims die within minutes unless the erratic heart rhythms can be halted with massive jolts of electricity from a defibrillator.
Color image produced by researchers shows a spiral wave of the type observed on the canine heart.
Medical researchers have now moved one step closer to understanding the causes of ventricular fibrillation through a remarkable series of high-resolution movies that clearly show how the condition disrupts the electrical signals that normally govern the heart. The unique high-speed imaging system produced for the research also revealed for the first time that ventricular fibrillation may develop in two distinct phases. Details of the work, done by an international team of medical researchers and physicists from the United States and Canada, appear in the March 5 issue of the journal Nature. We now have evidence of what is going on. This dramatically increases the possibility that we could develop a new defibrillator or improve existing defibrillators.