Design of Cryoprobe Tip for Pulmonary Vein Isolation

Pulmonary vein isolation is a method used for the treatment of arrhythmias originating within pulmonary veins. Cryoablation is a technique which employs extreme freezing to treat diseased or abnormal tissue. Cryoablation has gained importance in the treatment of pulmonary vein isolation for the patients suffering from atrial fibrillation. The proposed ellipsoidal ring shaped cryoprobe tip has eliminated the need of continuous point to point lesion ablation by ablating the entire circumferential area at a time. The aim of this paper is to discuss the design and advantages of the proposed tip. The desired time for the entire tip to reach a uniform temperature is ideally less than 2 s. But with the proposed tip the equilibrium condition was obtained in much lesser time of 0.5 s.